The pervasiveness of social network platforms (e.g. Facebook) has profoundly changed how we communicate and interact today, (e.g. in virtual platforms and communities), but they have also allowed us to represent, document and explore inter-personal relationships digitally. In parallel, our (computational) capabilities and resources are dramatically increasing and mean that many Internet connected users have significant resource endowments that are underutilized. Volunteered computing has taught us that at the edges of the Internet, resource owners are willing to make their resources available for “good uses” altruistically. Consider that the average Facebook user has 190 friends, and immediately a large connected network of resources based upon social relationships begins to present itself.

In this talk, the concept of Social Clouds will be presented capturing aspects such as inter-personal trust, platform implementation, use cases, and methodologies from computer science, economics and sociology used to explore this domain. Social Clouds are resource and service sharing frameworks that utilize relationships established between members of a social network. They provide an alternative environment where resource consumption can be established based upon implicit levels of trust in inter-personal relationships encoded within social network platforms. They are motivated by the need of individuals or groups for specific resources or capabilities that could be made available by connected peers and peer groups. Such resources are not necessarily only computational resources, but can be any electronically consumable service, including human skills and capabilities.