SOCA (2012) 6:351–362 DOI 10.1007/s11761-012-0111-5 SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER Social group formation with mobile cloud services Satish Narayana Srirama · Carlos Paniagua · Huber Flores Received: 5 March 2012 / Revised: 18 April 2012 / Accepted: 12 May 2012 / Published online: 31 May 2012 © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2012 Abstract Social networks have become quite popular these days, and the creation of social groups of people with com- mon interests results in sharing and collaborative relation- ships between the members. Besides, cloud computing and mobile computing domains have advanced rapidly and are the promising technologies for the near future. Mobile tech- nologies are recently drawing their attention to the cloud computing due to the increasing demand of the applications for processing power, storage space and energy. To bring the benefits from these different developments together, we tried to build an Android application, CroudSTag, which aids in forming social groups of common interest, from the mobile devices. The application obtains a set of pictures/videos from a storage cloud, uses cloud services like the video process- ing and the face recognition from multiple cloud providers to identify the people from the media content, and aids in form- ing social groups on facebook, a well-known social network. The application is explained along with detailed architectural and technological choices. The performance analysis of the application shows that the social groups can be formed with significant ease and reasonable performance latencies from the mobile devices. Keywords Social networks · Facial recognition · Cloud computing · Android application · Facebook · Middleware · MapReduce S. N. Srirama (B ) · C. Paniagua · H. Flores Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, J. Liivi 2, Tartu, Estonia e-mail: srirama@ut.ee C. Paniagua e-mail: paniagua@ut.ee H. Flores e-mail: huber@ut.ee 1 Introduction Social networks [7] have become very popular these days, with millions of users, from several countries and with different backgrounds and interests. Facebook [14] and Twitter [49] are the most popular social networks of them, with more than 800 million and 200 million active users, respectively. This number of people present in the network is a good opportunity to create professional and business con- nections around the world. People with common interests in the social network can take advantage of the social network benefits like public recognition, creation of relationships, referrals, and manage the social capital. Social groups [36] also result in sharing and collaborative relationships between the members. For example, a group of people working in the same research topic can collaborate with each other sharing resources, ideas, and knowledge, etc. This helps in achieving their common goals faster. At the same time, the cloud computing [4] domain has become quite popular and has led to new business models and application opportunities such as intensive batch pro- cessing applications for business analytics, human activity recognition, collaborative tools, among others. Cloud com- puting is a style of computing in which, typically, resources scalable on demand are provided “as a service (aaS)” over the Internet to the users who need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the cloud infrastructure that sup- ports them. The provisioning of cloud services occurs at the Infrastructural level (IaaS) or Platform level (PaaS) or at the Software level (SaaS). The vast number of services provided in the cloud has become a commodity in people’s day-to-day life. For instance, collaborative tools such as Google Docs and Zoho are extensively being used by millions of people around the world for document sharing. Similarly, thousands of pictures are being uploaded daily to cloud services such 123