Social Cloud: Cloud Computing in Social Networks

With the increasingly ubiquitous nature of Socialnetworks and Cloud computing, users are starting to explore newways to interact with, and exploit these developing paradigms.Social networks are used to reflect real world relationships thatallow users to share information and form connections betweenone another, essentially creating dynamic Virtual Organizations.We propose leveraging the pre-established trust formed throughfriend relationships within a Social network to form a dynamic“Social Cloud”, enabling friends to share resources within thecontext of a Social network. We believe that combining trust relationshipswith suitable incentive mechanisms (through financialpayments or bartering) could provide much more sustainableresource sharing mechanisms. This paper outlines our vision of,and experiences with, creating a Social Storage Cloud, lookingspecifically at possible market mechanisms that could be usedto create a dynamic Cloud infrastructure in a Social networkenvironment.