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The purpose of this article is to outline a conceptual framework on mobile applications that support social interactions among users to warrant commercial viability of such applications.

We build on the social network paradigm to propose an activity-based view on mobile application usage, and theoretically link the pertinent features of mobile social networking applications (MSNAs) to a set of measurement metrics concerning their commercial viability.

The conceptual framework formulated highlights how MSNAs can be systematically designed and deployed to ensure their commercial viability.

A pertinent set of features that support social networking among the users, and their plausible mechanisms in facilitating the commercial viability of MSNAs, are explicated. This facilitates future research endeavours in systematically investigating the emerging form of mobile applications. The limitation lies in a lack of empirical data to validate the formulated propositions, which is beyond the scope of this paper and is directed for future research.

A coherent set of measurement metrics are put forward for practitioners to measure the commercial viability of an MSNA. Also theoretically based insights are derived for how they can better derive commercial values from the emerging form of mobile applications.

Most relevant previous research has focused either on the MSNAs’ technical design aspects or user behavioural issues. This research ties up the themes on technical design, user behaviour and business consideration in formulating a research framework for assessing the commercial viability of MSNAs.

Recent smart mobile devices are capable of letting users produce various digital content, and share/upload the content to many social network services (SNS) directly via wireless network connections. The phenomenon has increased the number of people using mobile SNS applications. Although the applications have become more popular, mobile users have been restricted in the virtual communities of online SNS and are not aware of the social opportunities available to them in real-time surrounding. While they spend most of their time accessing online SNS, they have missed many opportunities to interact with others for new friendships, business opportunities or information sharing. Consequently, a new breed of mobile social network (MSN) system has arisen to assist mobile users to interact with proximal people and perform various social activities. Such a proximal-based MSN environment is termed a Mobile Social Network in Proximity (MSNP).

Developing an MSNP system needs to address a number of issues and challenges, such as heterogeneity, content/service discovery, privacy and trust, resource management, and so on. This paper identifies and describes these challenges, and reviews a number of related solutions from existing literature. In the follow up, this paper addresses a number of open challenges in the MSNP domain.

Although various works have been proposed to enable and overcome challenges in MSNP, there are still many unsolved open challenges in terms of identification, content management, social-aware discovery, trust in public environment, adaptation, quality of service and the development of MSNP. We have addressed these challenges in this paper as future research directions in the MSNP domain.

This paper provides an original literature review in MSNP and identifies a number of open challenges as research direction in the MSNP domain.

This paper aims to report on lessons learnt from operating a location‐aware mobile social networking application, and critical functionalities that were deemed necessary in order to provide a pleasant user experience. As a result of user feedback, the authors enhanced their social networking system, G2G, with functionalities such as login with Facebook.com credentials without the need to sign up to their system first, and a much improved localization system that works across different mobile operators. Mobile advertisement was included for enhancing the user experience.

A modular approach has been followed for the system design. The original G2G system interfaced cleanly with the Facebook application programming interfaces (APIs) and the mobile advertisement subsystem through wrapper components.

The result was a much improved user experience as existing Facebook subscriptions facilitated new users to use the system. Mobile advertisement functionalities were seen as an essential add‐on. The aforementioned functionalities, combined with the ability to upload/search/download location‐aware multimedia notes, and a back‐end interface that allows advertisers to add location‐aware, personalized content, resulted in a significantly enhanced user experience as evidenced by higher user active participation to the system.

The enhanced system integrates seamelessly with Facebook (facilitating thus the entry of new users) and with a mobile advertisement platform, and provides for advanced security functionalities. Moreover, it supports Android‐based smart‐phones.

The use of mobile wireless data services continues to increase worldwide. New fourth‐generation (4G) wireless networks can deliver data rates exceeding 2 Mbps. The purpose of this paper is to develop a framework of 4G mobile applications that utilize such high data rates and run on small form‐factor devices.

The author reviews existing literature of mobile applications development and proposes using network‐related characteristics to create a conceptual framework of these applications.

Combining traffic symmetry and latency yields a 2×3 framework with six categories that characterize current and emerging 4G mobile applications, such as augmented reality, mobile social networking and m‐health.

With the advent of high‐speed 4G networks, completely new mobile applications can be developed to leverage such high data rates, and a framework of such development efforts is highly desirable.

The framework is developed based on a perspective of technical characteristics because these characteristics intrinsically constrain the kinds of broadband mobile applications that can be developed. The framework should be useful in exploring opportunities of mobile application development and guiding future research in this area.

Social media, especially microblog, has become one of the most popular platforms for public opinion dissemination. However, so far few studies have been conducted to explore information dissemination under the mobile environment. This paper aims to introduce the approach to analyze the public opinion information dissemination in mobile social networks.

This paper chooses “network attack” as the research topic and extracts 23,567 relevant messages from Sina Microblogs to study the structure of nodes for public opinion dissemination and the characteristics of propagation paths on mobile internet. Public opinion dissemination is compared on both mobile and non-mobile terminals.

The results reveal the characteristics of public opinion dissemination in mobile environment and identify three patterns of information propagation path. This study concludes that public opinion on mobile internet propagates more widely and efficiently and generates more impact than that on the non-mobile internet.

The methods used in this study can be useful for the government and other organizations to analyze and identify problems in online information dissemination.

This paper explores the mechanism of public opinion dissemination on mobile internet in China and further investigates how to improve public opinion management through a case study related to “network attack.”

Many universities implemented institutional social networking apps as an alternative to in-person social experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to explore previously identified factors that influenced intentions to form collective actions, also known as we-intentions, on such social networking apps and their influence on student satisfaction with the app artifact.

Students from across a large university were invited to participate in a survey. Responses from 915 students who reported using the app were analyzed using a maximum likelihood covariance-based structural equation model. Analysis was conducted using the R programming language's psych, lavaan, and semTools packages.

The authors found that we-intentions are positively associated with recent app use and with student satisfaction with the app. Group norms were found to significantly influence the formation of we-intentions, while social identity is positively associated with both we-intentions and satisfaction.

The paper provides evidence that past research generalizes to the context of university mobile social networks and identifies a relationship between we-intentions and satisfaction in this context. It also provides practical insight into factors that influence we-intentions, and subsequently students' online education experience, in the context of a university's institutional mobile social network.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the key factors influencing the service innovation of mobile social networks (MSNs), figure out the mechanism of all factors in different stages of service innovation and help mobile social application developers promote better service innovation.

From previous research, this paper adopted nine initial factors that influence the service innovation of MSNs, and divide the service innovation process into three stages (i.e. demand analysis, service design and innovation implementation). On that basis, the authors constructed a model, and then collected data from 184 managers from 20 leading MSN corporates in China through questionnaires to examine the model. Furthermore, factor analysis was used to extract key factors influencing the service innovation of MSNs, correlation analysis was employed to discuss the relationship among factors and regression analysis was applied to explore their specific roles in different stages in the service innovation process.

The empirical results show that the service innovation of MSNs is mainly influenced by five key factors: user, developer, market environment, social environment and technology. The authors found that different factors played remarkably different roles in the three stages. In specific, all factors but technology are important in the demand analysis stage; all factors but social environment are critical to service design; and all factors but user contribute to the implementation of service innovation.

The results of this study can help mobile social application developers and mobile social service providers in China to better understand the driving force of service innovation and what should be emphasized in different stages, and then find the optimal path to implement service innovation, improve their service quality and user experience and facilitate the development of Chinese MSNs.

This is the first research that comprehensively explores factors influencing the service innovation of Chinese MSNs from multi-dimensional perspectives, which provides profound theoretical guidance to the practice of service innovation in China. Also, it contributes to the development of innovation theory of traditional web services.

This study examines the direct and indirect effect mechanisms of how using smartphones for social media is associated with college students' civic engagement via levels of communication network heterogeneity and social capital. In addition, this study tests whether such indirect effects mechanisms are moderated by the need to belong.

The study analyzes data from an online survey (N = 580) conducted at a public university. The PROCESS macro is used to examine the mediation association between mobile social media use, communication network heterogeneity, social capital, and civic engagement and the moderated mediation conditional upon need to belong.

College students who often use smartphones for social media were more likely to communicate with people who have different socio-demographic characteristics and different opinions. There was also a positive mediation mechanism between smartphone use for social media, network heterogeneity, social capital and civic engagement, which means that college students who often use mobile social media are more likely to communicate with heterogeneous others and develop a sense of social capital, which in turn led to greater levels of civic engagement. Importantly, these indirect effects of smartphone use for social media on civic engagement were stronger for those with greater levels of need to belong.

The findings of the current study are significant given that little is known about how young adults' mobile social media use is associated with communication network heterogeneity and civic engagement in their everyday life. The research expands the research agenda by investigating the most popular interactive communication media platforms.

The key purpose of this paper is to overview the many issues related to the integration of social sensing and pervasive sensing in the support of adaptive context-aware services.

From the analysis of existing proposals and prototypes, the authors found out that the process of integrating social and pervasive sensing can follow a limited number of approaches, which enables the authors to properly frame the proposals existing in the literature (and/or available as prototype infrastructures) according to a simple taxonomy, which is very useful to make the survey much more effective than a simple list of systems and proposals.

The taxonomy shows that, when integrating social sensing with pervasive sensing, it is possible, at one extreme, to exploit social network as a mere source of information and have such information flow towards the infrastructure supporting the execution of pervasive computing services. At the other extreme, it is possible exploiting a social network as an infrastructure for the integration, by having data from pervasive devices flow towards social networks. In between the extremes, different means can consider to have social networks and pervasive infrastructures converge towards each other to enable the integration of social and pervasive sensing.

Besides introducing the main concepts related to social sensing and framing the key approaches that can be undertaken to pursue the integration with traditional pervasive sensing, the authors go further discussing open issues and key research challenges behind their seamless integration.

This study aims to investigate how aspects of mobility affect social media advertising effectiveness (i.e. consumer purchase intention) on mobile platforms from the perspective of the fit-viability model.

Data were collected through an online questionnaire survey of 378 WeChat users and used to test hypotheses with structural equation modeling.

Consumer purchase intention is significantly positively influenced by time flexibility, spatial flexibility, mobile lifestyle and ad relevance. Meanwhile, ambivalence toward ads mediates the relationships of time flexibility and spatial flexibility with purchase intention and moderates the relationships of mobile lifestyle and ad relevance with purchase intention.

The findings offer researchers and practitioners a new angle to understand advertising effectiveness on mobile social media and extend the application of the fit-viability model.

This paper fills the research gap on the role of mobility in social media advertising.