Enabling Next Generation Multimedia Social Services

For more than twenty years we have been living in a society of online social relationships, where people tend to connect and share with others. Despite we have not yet seen its truly utility, we are facing an era of social functionality where social context can be used to personalize multimedia content and services. Contributing towards this vision, this paper presents an architectural approach that will enable multimedia social services, by securely exposing user social profiles, relationships and interests. Furthermore, it extends these data by providing interfaces to infer distance, similarity and influence. In addition, by connecting with an external framework, it enhances the supported functionalities, allowing the calculation of relevant social network metrics. Finally, it introduces the results from our prototype implementation.