Has Anyone Seen My Goose? Social Network Services in Developing Regions

In developing regions, Internet connectivity is extremely poor, while mobile phone penetration is much higher. The inhabitants of developing countries still rely on traditional social mechanisms, such as word-of-mouth, to gather most information that they use in everyday life. In this paper, we propose Goose, a social network service (SNS) architecture for developing regions, which provides services including friend searching, resource sharing and information seeking. Goose uses both the limited GSM coverage and delay tolerant networking (DTN) technology on mobile phones, to enable social information exchange even without cellular data coverage.