THINPLE - the new online Sociality is built on top of NFC-based Contacts

The rapid densification of today´s online social networks is progressively draining their early value of mirroring real life sociality. This paper describes THINPLE, a novel mobile computing app aiming at building a protected and trusted online social space where the growth of the sociality of a person is only fuelled by contacts in the physical world. THINPLE exploits each physical contact, through the short radio range of Near Field Communication, NFC, to capture the explicit willingness and trustworthiness to initiate a online relationship. Moreover, through physical contacts, inanimate objects of the real world can be added to the online sociality of individuals, thus turning into practice the concept of Internet of things and people.