Proximiter: Enabling mobile proximity-based content sharing on portable devices

The recent years have witnessed an explosive amount of user-generated contents, along with users' soaring demands on sharing these contents. An evidence of that is the blossom of hundreds of sharing sites on the web, among which the most famous are MySpace [1], Flickr [2], YouTube [3], Facebook [4] and LinkedIn [5]. Through these sites, users upload the contents they generate (blogs, pictures, videos, resumes, etc.), and make them available to their friends or the general public. A common characteristic of such Internet-based content sharing scenarios is that all contents are hosted by third-party servers on the Internet, and sharing happens when content consumers (regardless of where they are) access the hosting web sites.