Shaping the future of social networks
Over four billion people use social media platforms, a number that continues to rise. These platforms have become the main channels for people to share content in real time, from photos and blogs to business adverts. However, some of the online applications fail to address the complexity of social structures whereby users change roles frequently from one network to another in several independent but interconnected contexts. “It can be argued that current social networks do not see a contextual social graph as a means to express and empower meaningful relationships; their role is purely a content distribution channel,” notes Ville Ollikainen, project coordinator of the EU-funded HELIOS project. On top of this, social media networks give users the impression they are in full control of their data. In reality, the owners of social media platforms have the control, heightening concerns over privacy and ownership of data. The HELIOS project is addressing these current challenges. “We aimed to design, implement and validate a state-of-the-art decentralised peer-to-peer social media platform to support the development of social media apps, ensuring the highest level of trust and control for content creation and sharing, in line with all the ethical and legal requirements,” says Ollikainen.
Mobile peer-to-peer social media platform
HELIOS developed a mobile peer-to-peer decentralised privacy-by-design social media platform, upon which developers can build social media services independently from any ecosystem. “We indeed have mobile peer-to-peer communications, which in contrast to more common federated paradigm does not rely on fixed servers storing data that people share. "As easy as it may sound, we should remember that while mobile devices are prone to get disconnected from the internet from time to time, messages must still be reliably delivered,” outlines Ollikainen. The platform supports automatic feedback with privacy aspects whereby users will know when their messages have been received. What’s more, social connections will be associated with context dependent trust. HELIOS has also studied and implemented novel features for social media, such as contextual communications, information overload control, trust and rewarding. “Throughout the project, the development of HELIOS was inspired by real-life organic networking, taking into account contextual, spatial and temporal aspects of human communications,” Ollikainen explains. For social media developers, the project created and validated a toolkit with sample apps showcasing selected features. “Some of the apps developed in the project were subject to an unsupervised one-month piloting, indicating technology readiness level that is rare for any Research and Innovation Actions project,” notes Ollikainen.
Peer-to-peer communications in the future
The technical effort in HELIOS led to an observation that peer-to-peer technologies in mobile platforms today are more challenging than they used to be due to enhanced security requirements for mobile platforms. “This underlines the importance of continuous development of low-level peer-to-peer communications,” adds Ollikainen. In the future, due to increasing real-time communications between mobile devices, peer-to-peer will likely to be natively supported in mobiles. “The platform, modular as it is, will grow with new functionalities and innovations beyond the scope of the project itself,” concludes Ollikainen.
Keywords
HELIOS, peer-to-peer, social media platform, trust, privacy, social networks, apps, mobile platform, verification
