Proximates – A Social Context Engine

Several studies have shown the value of using proximity data to understand the social context of users. To simplify the use of social context in application development we have developed Proximates, a social context engine for mobile phones. It scans nearby Bluetooth peers to determine what devices are in proximity. We map Bluetooth MAC ids to user identities on existing social networks which then allows Proximates to infer the social context of the user. The main contribution of Proximates is its use of link attributes retrieved from Facebook for granular relationship classification. We also show that Proximates can bridge the gap between physical and digital social interactions, by showing that it can be used to measure how much time a user spends in physical proximity with his Facebook friends. In this paper we present the architecture and initial experimental results on deployment usability aspects of users of an example application. We also discuss using location for proximity detection versus direct sensing using Bluetooth.