Offline Social Networks: stepping away from the Internet (Position paper)

Online social networks have been revolutionary in the way people interact over the Internet today. Typically in online social networks the information is ephemeral while the relationships between users are sustainable. While they have been very successful, they usually do not leverage the notion of physical proximity. In addition the sustainable nature of the connections does not leave any room for sporadic and fleeting social relations. In this position paper, we explore the concept of offline social network considering geographical locality as a first-class citizen. Offline social networks do not aim at capturing long-standing relationships and in that sense are very complementary to online ones. Being implemented off the Internet, they avoid privacy breaches that users start to complain about. An offline social network relies on a hardware device, plugged in some location, to which anyone can freely connect. In an offline social network, while the relationships between users are ephemeral, the information can be temporary or permanent depending on the application scenarios. We believe that such a concept matches a wide spectrum of usages today that are not covered by online social networks. In this position paper, we describe the concept, the potential applications, the underlying technologies as well as the associated exciting research agenda.