SnapN'Share:
Socially Informed Ad-hoc Creation and Sharing of Content

SnapN’Share is the first sample application that makes use of the Comm.unity platform. SnapN'Share runs on wireless mobile devices as well as stationary computers, and enables users to generate and seamlessly share content with different groups and communities that they belong to, as they come within close proximity of their peers.

• SnapN'Share Features:
  • Content Sharing App Features:
    • Local Filtering
      - Access to locally relevant information
      - Local proximity as bootstrap to new peers
    • Group & Context Based Exchange
      - "Virtual Spaces" for different social groups (friends, family, classmates, etc.)
      - Easy creation of ad-hoc or time-limited groups (e.g. meeting attendees)
      - Public groups for content exchange with strangers (news, blogs, music, etc.)
    • Trust and Identity
      - Differentiate strangers and familiar peers (e.g. spam prevention)
      - Varying degrees of trust and privacy
      - Allow different identities
    • Content survivability - Data spreads over trusted devices like wildfire (redundancy, freedom of press)
  • SnapN'Share also enjoys all of the Comm.unity platform's features.
     
• Knight Foundation:
  Project was first runner up in the Knight Foundation's $5M news challenge (Among winners were institutes such as MIT and MTV). The project is now part of MIT's new Center for Future Civic Media (C4FCM)
   
• Publications/Presentations
  • 2-page overview (PDF)

   

  • CCNC'08:
    Nadav Aharony, Andrew Lippman and David P. Reed, Demonstrating SnapN'Share: Content Sharing Over a Socially Informed, Hyper-Local, Face-to-Face Networking Platform. Fifth Annual IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC'2008), Las Vegas, USA, January 2008 (to appear).
    Also to be presented in the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), January 2008.
    • Accepted 2 pager: (PDF)
    • Demonstration Poster: (PDF)

 

Some Pictures from the CCNC demo in January '08:

SnapN'Share Demo Description

Demo was running on six devices: 4xN800 tablet devices, Windows XP laptop and Linux Laptop (only Linux laptop shown here since the XP was busy showing the concept video...). All devices detect the presence of peers, and find out the different groups they belong to. Devices then synchronize content present in the "virtual-space" of matching groups.

Any new content generated, a still picture taken with the N800 camera in our case, is tagged by the user to be shared with any subset of the groups the user belongs to. The content is then automatically added to their virtual-space, and is immediately sent to any present node that is also part of that group. Other peers not present will receive the new content the first time they are in proximity of any member carrying it.

Nearby peers are graphically displayed through the social dashboard (not shown here). The dashboard interface allows other types of communication, such as chat messages. It also enables other types of actions, like creating new groups and inviting peers to a group, all in an ad-hoc, distributed and unmanaged way.