Dynamic Media Distribution in Ad-hoc Social Networks

This paper proposes a social distribution mechanism for finding, connecting and propagating contents in social networks using context and communication history of users together with meta information about the content. The proposed mechanism operates by propagating invitation messages to a prioritized group of users to build up an ad-hoc social network from the original social network while at the same time preventing spamming the users with unwanted invitation messages. The proposed mechanism makes it possible to implement and deploy a wide variety of services targeting the specific needs of a user. As a proof-of-concept, the paper shows how the proposed social distribution mechanism can be used to invite users to a shared space, which can contain various kinds of collaboration tools allowing a group of users to communicate and solve problems together. In order to investigate the efficiency of the proposed mechanism, the paper also presents result from a simulation study. The result shows that the social distribution mechanism should consider both social strength and context for propagating social media contents as some of the recipients may have equal interest of the social media but different level of trust about the originator.