Infofunnel: Design and implementation of a social network based peer-to-peer information sharing and dissemination system for mobile users

Today, the information sea is much bigger than anybody can touch. We need technology to help us wade through all the information and find the items we really want and need. INFOFUNNEL provides a new way for information sharing and dissemination, which is based on peer-to-peer data sharing and uses short range wireless connectivity for information exchanging among the mobile wireless devices without WAP. Here, we try to treat the social network as part of the information sharing and dissemination system, like information processing nodes, to help us recognize mobile users' needs and identify more interesting services. We use Opportunity Network (OppNet) as a channel to potentially combine the information exchange channels with users' information need, and carry out two steps to build the information exchange agent for each user. We discuss the design and an implementation of INFOFUNNEL. INFOFUNNEL has been implemented in Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices (NOKIA N800).