Abstract | The research area of mobile and networking technologies applied to the social field has made rapid advances, due to the increasing development of new mobile technologies and the widespread usage of the Internet as a new platform for social interactions. New mobile and networking technologies such as 3G/4G cellular networks and the new generation of wireless local area networks and ad hoc networks are devoted to playing an important role in many areas of social activities, predominantly in those areas where having the right data at the right time is of mission-critical importance. Moreover, mobile and networking technologies for social applications serve groups of people in shared activities, in particular geographically distributed groups who are collaborating on some task in a shared context or independently from their location. As these social applications tend to be large-scale and complex, they have to face difficult social and policy issues such as those related to privacy and security access. By their real nature, mobile technologies can be considered multidisciplinary technologies involving social aspects; indeed they often involve personal, groups and ubiquitous issues, supporting inter-personal connections and involving human-technology interaction in different, and dispersed, contexts. Mobile technologies also play an essential role in personalizing working and interaction contexts, and supporting experimentation and innovation, and the advancement of the field is fundamental for developing social networking. Social networking technologies bring friends, family members, co-workers and other social communities together. These technologies are convergent, emerging from a variety of applications such as search engines and employee evaluation routines, while running on equally diverse platforms from server clusters to wireless phone networks. Networking technologies have to face emerging problems of robustness, such as vulnerabilities to reliability and performance due to malicious attack. The third international workshop on Mobile and Networking Technologies for social applications (MONET 2008) was held in November 2008 in Monterrey. The aim of the workshop is to gather researchers, from academia and industry, and practitioners to discuss new mobile and networking technologies, to identify challenging problems that appear in the social applications of those technologies and to show the results and experiences gathered by researchers. This year, after a rigorous review process that involved 4 referees for each paper, 11 papers were accepted for inclusion in these conference proceedings. The success of the MONET 2008 workshop would not have been possible without the contribution of the OTM 2008 workshops organizers, PC members and authors of papers, all of whom we would like to sincerely thank. |
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