A case for automatic sharing over social networks

The proliferation of sharing on social networks, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Linkedin, and Foursquare, has closely connected people more than ever before. Our hypothesis is that, modulo privacy concerns, people are willing to share a lot more useful information than they are currently doing, but do not have the time and energy to do so. For instance, (1) people would like to share their current availability to receive a call with their most frequent phone contacts, (2) drivers would like to share road conditions with other drivers in the vicinity. By automating the sharing process, we posit that a whole new array of applications become possible. Smart mobile devices possess rich sensors, continuous connectivity and push notifications, which enable them to continuously share information with other devices, in real time. In this paper, we explore the opportunity for automatic sharing, and the challenges it introduces. We introduce a novel architecture called SBone which enables devices to automatically share useful information with each other, and present two applications that enable the above two scenarios by utilizing SBone.