BBC NEWS | Technology | HP test mobile social network called Friendlee

Or “Oh God not another Social Network.” This one runs on your cellphone and according to HP builds a network of people you actually interact with. That is counter to most current networks which consist of many followers but few who you actually communicate with directly.

The more you interact with someone the closer they go to the top of the list. Research shows that many relationships on current social networks such as Twitter and Facebook were meaningless from an interaction point of view. The link between any two people doesn’t imply any interaction. Most people who use these services tend to interact with very few people even though they follow or are followed by many.

Friendlee has been created to address these issues and constructs what the researches call an “intimate social network”.

“The idea of a social network that deals with reciprocity – I call you, you call me, we interact and so on – is much more meaningful than a listing like your whole Rolodex of everyone you’ve ever met,” explained Professor Huberman.

The application constructs the list by analysing the user’s call and messaging history to identify the people they are closest to.

“By using phone conversations as an indicator of close social interaction, Friendlee trims the user’s large casual social network into a core intimate one,” the researchers wrote in the paper to be presented in Bonn.

The applications currently runs on both Windows Mobile and Google Android handsets. A prototype for Blackberry users was also shown off at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium in May.

“We can make it run on anything,” said Professor Huberman.

The application will be shown off at the Mobile HCI conference in Bonn, Germany between 15-18 September.