Making things socialize in the Internet — Does it help our lives?

Current communication and computation technologies make it possible to embed intelligence and communication capabilities in most of the things surrounding us; this leading to the Internet of Things (IoT) concept. To really exploit the potential of the IoT, objects and provided services should be easily discoverable and usable by humans and by other objects. Besides, trustworthiness of the billions of members of the IoT should be a key element in service selection. Existing solutions for service discovery in IoT do not scale with the number of nodes that is expected to be order of magnitude larger than in the current Internet. In this paper we propose to build a social network, that we name the Social Internet of Things (SIoT), that can be used to provide a navigable structure to the IoT. We also provide a framework that can be applied to socially tie things together and a preliminary architecture to be used as a baseline for the implementation of the SIoT. Our work demonstrates that standards should support establishment and management of federations of objects (ruled by social relationships) that represent “communities” of things in the SIoT.