Nearound is a
mobile distributed social network, designed
to reinforce ideas of data ownership, privacy and
storage of private data directly on mobile devices,
owned by users.

It is based on two core technologies:

peer-to-peer over ad-hoc Wi-Fi connection and
peer-to-peer over Internet connection.

Both technologies are based on JSON-RPC protocol.

P2P over ad-hoc allows users to form groups in close
vicinity to each other and communicate in various ways
similar to current social networks features.

This technology substitutes traditional GPS-based
positioning and is much more secure, because
it does not operate with absolute coordinates
and, consequently, there is no threat of disclosing
this personal data.


We call it relative positioning.

P2P over Internet allows doing the same, but for
geographically scattered users.
In case of connecting over Internet there is an
intermediate server, which allows transferring
encrypted data from one mobile phone
to another that are located behind NATs.