Hybrid SN: Interlinking Opportunistic and Online Communities to Augment Information Dissemination

In modern life, people are involved in multiple online and offline social communities. Previous works on content sharing and information dissemination are single-community oriented. The complementary features as well as the joint-effect of distinct forms of social communities, however, has not been well explored. In this paper, we present hybrid social networking (HSN), which highlights the interweaving and cooperation of heterogeneous communities. In particular, we present and demonstrate how HSN augments information dissemination in human daily life. The infrastructure, community creation and cross-community information dissemination algorithms, and a use case of HSN are presented. A real mobility trace of 104 users is employed to validate the performance of HSN, in comparison with single-community dependent methods.