Enhancing Online Communities with Cycle-Sharing for Social Networks

Abstract The Internet has made it possible to exchange information more rapidly on a global scale. A natural succeeding step was the creation of Social networks where anyone in the world can share their experiences, content and current informa-tion, using only their Internet enabled personal computer or mobile devices. Under this scope there are many Social Networks such as Facebook, Orkut or Youtube each one exporting their own APIs to interact with their users and groups databases. Studies done on Social Networks show that they follow some properties like the Small-World property. Meaning that traversing friendship relations, vast numbers of other users could be reached from each single user (e.g., Friends of Friends), even though users usually only interact (on a daily basis) with a restrict group of friends. Considering that these networks could be regarded as enabling peer-to-peer information sharing (albeit mediated by a centrally controlled infrastructure), em-ploying them for cycle-sharing should be a great improvement for global distributed computing, by allowing public-resource sharing among trusted users and within on-line virtual communities. Resources from these types of networks can be used t