Seeking new social networking models

The Web is rapidly evolving form a human-to-machine to a human-to-human communication means. Unfortunately the current proliferation of Social Networking Web sites is generating fragmentation and lack of interoperability. In order to be in contact with friends users must be subscribed and upload their contents to the same online Social networking provider. In this paper we propose a concrete alternative to the current state of the art: overcoming vertical silos´ approach and enabling open, distributed and Context Aware Social Networking being respectful of users´ privacy and data ownership. Telecom Italia is investing in this research area within EU FP7 project SOCIETIES.