Fluid Nexus: A Continuously Changing Network
Throughout the first few lectures of this course, we have focused on graph theory, focusing on its application in friendship networks. One interesting aspect of this approach was that we considered these networks to be fixed (stable), without considering their change with respect to time. In fact, it is easy to imagine that a friendship network would not change so rapidly, so this approach is reasonable. However, what if networks were constantly changing over short periods of time?
Fluid Nexus, a mobile phone application developed by Nicholas A. Knouf and several co-developers, addresses how we can change this paradigm. Fluid Nexus is an application which users can use to spread information to one another. So how is it different from services such as Twitter? It uses a non-centralized, peer-to-peer network, bypassing corporate intermediaries via Bluetooth and link-local wifi technologies. The central concept here is that people – the nodes in our graph – are carriers of data, while the connections made between them via Fluid Nexus – the edges – are routes through which this data can spread. Since connections between different mobile phones can only exist when they are in close proximity of one another (about 10 meters for Bluetooth, as the developer states), we can easily imagine how as individuals move around, old edges disappear and new nodes are created.
These two simple facts – that networks change rapidly over time, and that edges represent flow of data, not friendship – give us many implications as to what other factors we should consider. First, the fact that data is spread due to physical proximity implies that you may send data to people that you may have no previous connections with. How will this affect what messages you could send? Perhaps, if you only intended a particular audience (or a set of audiences) to understand the message, you may use some form of stenography. In other cases, people may send false information out of malicious intent. And since the messages in Fluid Nexus are completely anonymous, it will be interesting to see how the group of people using this service will handle this loophole. The fact that our graph representation of this network changes rapidly over time also opens up the possibility of examining parts of the graph as time passes by. For example, if a close group of people stay connected for a long period of time, how could we identify the nature of this group? Would they be a close group of friends, or perhaps a group of activists in the same place for a common goal? How could the introduction of a new node in this network disrupt this stable connection? Although the program is still in its alpha stage, Fluid Nexus’s concept by itself gives us many new ways to analyze how networks are created and maintained.
Link: http://fluidnexus.net/