  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.
