A Collaborative Cloud-Based Multimedia Sharing Platform for Social Networking Environments

The amount of multimedia content on the internet has been growing at a remarkable rate, and users are increasingly looking to share online media with colleagues and friends on social networks. Several commercial and academic solutions have attempted to make it easier to share this large variety of online content with others, but they are generally limited to sending links. Existing products have not been able to provide a scalable cloud-based system that synchronizes disparate web content among many users in real-time. Additionally, they have lacked a platform with a modular architecture that can be extended by developers to support new sources of online media. In this paper, a cloud-based software architecture for a multimedia collaboration platform is introduced. The platform is accessible from a typical web browser and allows users to collaborate over webcam chat while viewing videos, photos, maps, documents, and listening to music, all in real-time. As examples, it is shown how a distributed system called Watch Together was deployed to real users within Facebook and an e-learning environment. Usage data is provided from both deployments and observations are made on how users share and consume real-time multimedia content.