USNB: Enabling Universal Online Social Interactions Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny
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USNB: Enabling Universal Online Social Interactions Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny To cite this version: Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny. USNB: Enabling Universal Online Social In- teractions. 2017 IEEE 3rd International Conference on Collaboration and Internet Computing (CIC), Oct 2017, San Jose, United States. pp.309-318, 10.1109/CIC.2017.00048. hal-01591757 HAL Id: hal-01591757 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01591757 Submitted on 21 Sep 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. USNB: Enabling Universal Online Social Interactions Rafael Angarita∗y§, Nikolaos Georgantasy and Valérie Issarnyy ∗LISITE Laboratory. ISEP Paris, France yMiMove Team. Inria Paris, France [email protected], fi[email protected] Abstract—Online social network services (OSNSs) public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, have become an integral part of our daily lives. At the (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they same time, the aggressive market competition has led share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their to the emergence of multiple competing siloed OSNSs that cannot interoperate. As a consequence, people list of connections and those made by others within face the burden of creating and managing multiple the system”. Other works such as [9] and [10] also OSNS accounts and learning how to use them to stay emphasize the public or semi-public profile notion, connected. This paper is concerned with relieving users which allows users to create a description of them- from such a burden by enabling universal online social selves, when defining OSNSs. These definitions exclude interactions. The contributions of this paper span: (1) a model of the universal social network bus (USNB) important non-profile-based services such as WhatsApp for OSNS interoperability; (2) a prototype for universal and email, for example. Indeed, researchers consider online social interactions that builds upon the proposed that messages exchanged by email users, and therefore model; and (3) a preliminary experimental evaluation users of any digital communication service, also form involving 50 participants. Results show that people are online social networks [11]. positive about the solution as they are able to reach out a larger community of users independently of the Since the emergence of OSNSs, the number of in- OSNSs they use. dividuals using them has exploded. Some of the most Index Terms—Online social networks, Online social popular OSNSs are Facebook, QQ, WeChat, QZone, interactions, Computer-mediated communication, In- Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. As of January 2017, teroperability, Middleware, Service bus. and according to OSNSs statistics [12], there are more I. Introduction than 2,789 billion active OSNS users in the world. Further, this number grew by 21% in 2016, and it Since humans -and other primates and animals- are is expected to continue increasing. Still, the above social creatures, social networks have existed long statistics do not include widely used communication before the Digital Age and still exist independently of technologies such as email while it is estimated that it [1], [2], [3]. Social networks are social structures the number of email users will increase to over 4.1 made up of a set of social actors, sets of dyadic billion by the end of 2021 [13]. ties, and other social interactions between actors. The Another interesting fact is that, today, more than emergence of the Internet has led to the creation of half of the Internet users (52%) use two or more a plethora of software applications focused on social OSNSs [14]. One of the reasons behind these multiple interactivity: from email in the 1960s and bulletin memberships is the Fear of Missing Out [15], which board systems in the 1970s, to Sixdegrees in 1997, and is driven by the idea that others might be having Facebook in 2004. Today, applications for social inter- rewarding experiences while one is absent and leads actions are known as social networking services [4] or to the desire to stay continually connected. Other sites [5], social media [6], online social networks [7], reasons relate to the specialization of some OSNSs or just social networks [8]. We adopt the term Online (e.g., LinkedIn for professional use) that allow reach- Social Network Service (OSNS) to refer to any digital ing different audiences [7], and/or the need to join platform allowing people to interact and build social other OSNSs to be able to connect with friends and relations. family. A national survey in the U.S. shows that users A widely accepted definition of OSNSs is the one are overwhelmed due to their multiple accounts [16], presented in [5], where authors define them as “web- leading them to consider taking a break from one or based services that allow individuals to: (1) construct a more OSNSs. Not surprisingly, the same study found §This work was done when the author was at Inria. that most of the users wish there was a solution to the multiple membership problem. siloed OSNSs based on the service bus paradigm OSNSs usually provide basic messaging functional- which was introduced by the distributed system ities such as private messages via instant messaging community in the 2000s to overcome the arising services or internal email, and public or semi-public heterogeneity among distributed services. message boards (also called user’s wall or timeline) [7], • Prototype implementation. SectionIV showcases a [9]. These functionalities allowing OSNS users to inter- working prototype of the proposed USNB, which act can be classified as social interaction services [17], provides interoperability between OSNSs for on- in contrast to other functionalities such as profile line social interactions. The prototype enables a building. In general, we say that any system providing variety of interactions between systems and peo- people the possibility of sending messages to other ple. people or systems is a social interaction service, and • Evaluation. SectionV presents an experimental thereby include communication technologies such as study involving 50 volunteers. Results show that email, SMS and WhatsApp, just to mention some ex- participants are willing to use our solution for amples, in this classification. OSNS interoperability; provide feedback about The problem arises when a user of a particular social what participants expect from such a solution; and interaction service wants to interact with a user of highlight the feasibility of OSNS interoperability. a different one. In the case of decentralized open Finally, SectionVI concludes with a summary of our technologies such as email, both users must have an contribution and future directions. email account, but the email service provider does not matter. For closed proprietary platforms such as II. Background Facebook Messenger, both users are forced to have There have been efforts to describe, characterize, a Facebook Messenger account. Still, both cases re- and envision the future of OSNSs [4], [7], [17], [18]. quire users to interact via the same social interaction These works are written narratively, so they do not service leading them to the undesired management propose models for OSNSs and their functionalities. On of multiple accounts. Additionally, some social interac- another note, the unprecedented availability of large tion services require users to be online at the same amounts of data produced by OSNSs users has served time to interact. Making different social interaction as motivation for many researchers to understand services interoperate also requires solving application OSNS user behavior. Other research is concerned with data and middleware protocol mismatches. Moreover, user identity spanning multiple OSNSs to understand the user interfaces of social interaction services only the dangers of personal information leakage when hav- allow interacting with users of the same service. For ing multiple OSNSs profiles [19], and to find a mapping instance, email users can only specify emails as the among identities of individuals across OSNSs [20]. destination, while Facebook Messenger only shows Regarding OSNSs interoperability, the existing solu- other Facebook Messenger users in its contact list; tions focus on enabling users to interact across OSNSs therefore, a mechanism must be conceived to overcome boundaries. One common solution to overcome hetero- this limitation. This is the issue we tackle in this paper, geneity is to introduce standards such as the ones pro- where we introduce an interoperability solution for posed by the W3 Social Web Working Group1. However, social interaction services. More precisely, this paper the OSNS market is too competitive for providers to features the following contributions: be willing to adopt a common standard [6]. On the • Background on interoperability of online social contrary, many siloed OSNSs keep proliferating and interactions. SectionII introduces some OSNS gaining popularity. Thus, other solutions have emerged research and describes