14. Social Network-Based Media Sharing in the Ubiquitous Environment: Technologies and Applications

Ubiquitous computing paradigm fundamentally changed the relationship between humans and computers. In the ubiquitous environment, computing functionalities are naturally integrated with the surrounding objects rather than being isolated units by themselves. Instead of requiring humans to learn how to use computers, intelligence in the environment is smart enough to automatically sense and serve users’ needs. Since the origination of ubiquitous computing concept in the late 1980s, a great amount of research and development efforts have taken place in this field, and the paradigm has undergone substantial evolvement. As new technologies and application models keep emerging and growing mature, many of the old goals envisioned by ubiquitous computing researchers have turned into realities, and novel ones become focused on, making the paradigm an actively moving target to be pursued. In recent years, media sharing established itself as a hot topic in the ubiquitous computing community, thanks to the power of several critical driving forces. An especially important one among these forces is social networking. In this chapter, we first present the background of ubiquitous environment, social networks, and media sharing. In this part we illustrate why and how social network-based media sharing is destined to be indispensable in the ubiquitous environment. Several representative applications are subsequently examined in depth as case studies. The last part of the chapter gives an overlook of future directions envisioned from an expert’s eye.