A Critical Note on Social Cloud

The idea of a social cloud has emerged as a resource sharing paradigm in a social network context. Undoubtedly, state-of-the-art social cloud systems demonstrate the potential of the social cloud acting as complementary to other computing paradigms such as the cloud, grid, peer-to-peer and volunteer computing. However, in this note, we have done a critical survey of the social cloud literature and come to the conclusion that these initial efforts fail to offer a general framework of the social cloud, also, to show the uniqueness of the social cloud. This short note reveals that there are significant differences regarding the concept of social cloud, resource definition, resource sharing and allocation mechanism, and its application and stakeholders. This study is an attempt to express a need for a general framework of the social cloud, which can incorporate various views and resource sharing setups discussed in the literature.