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Section: New Results

Universal Social Network Bus

Participants : Ehsan Ahvar, Shohreh Ahvar, Rafael Angarita, Nikolaos Georgantas, Valérie Issarny, Bruno Lefèvre.

Online social network services (OSNSs) are changing the fabric of our society, impacting almost every aspect of it. Over the last decades, the aggressive market rivalry has led to the emergence of multiple competing, "closed" OSNSs. As a result, users are trapped in the walled gardens of their OSNS, encountering restrictions about what they can do with their personal data, the people they can interact with and the information they get access to. As an alternative to the platform lock-in, "open" OSNSs promote the adoption of open, standardized APIs. However, users still massively adopt closed OSNSs to benefit from the services' advanced functionalities and/or follow their "friends", although the users' virtual social sphere is ultimately limited by the OSNSs they join. Our work aims at overcoming such a limitation by enabling users to meet and interact beyond the boundary of their OSNSs, including reaching out to "friends" of distinct closed OSNSs. We specifically introduce USNB -Universal Social Network Bus, which revisits the "service bus" paradigm that enables interoperability across computing systems, to address the requirements of "social interoperability". USNB features synthetic profiles and personae for interaction across the boundaries of –closed and open–, –profile- and non-profile-based– OSNSs through a reference social interaction service.

USNB enables users to reach out to their social peers independently of the communication service (and especially underlying platform) each one uses in the virtual world. The success and massive adoption of OSNSs -as magnified by the success of Facebook- shows that online social communication is an essential tool for people. This further paves the way for collective and collaborative actions at the Internet scale. However, existing online collaborative tools come along with their communication platform, which is either a proprietary solution or a third-party OSNS. We argue that USNB contributes to enabling participatory systems at a larger inclusive scale by overcoming the technical boundaries set by existing online communication platforms. In that direction, we investigate the customization of USNB for specific applications and more specifically: participatory systems and massive open online courses.