SIN: A Platform to Make Interactions in Social Networks Accessible

• Published in: 2012 International Conference on Social Informatics pp. 205 - 214
• Main Authors: Nia, Roozbeh, Erlandsson, F., Bhattacharyya, P., Rahman, M. R., Johnson, H., Wu, S. F.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-12-2012
• Subjects: Facebook Graph API; Social Interactions; Social Networks
• DOI: 10.1109/SocialInformatics.2012.29
• ISBN: 9781479902347; 1479902349

Online Social Networks (OSNs) are popular platforms for interaction, communication and collaboration between friends. In this paper we develop and present a new platform to make interactions in OSNs accessible. Most of today's social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ provide support for third party applications to use their social network graph and content. Such applications are strongly dependent on the set of software tools and libraries provided by the OSNs for their own development and growth. For example, third party companies like CNN provide recommendation materials based on user interactions and user's relationship graph. One of the limitations with this graph (or APIs) is the segregation from the shared content. We believe, and present in this paper, that the content shared and the actions taken on the content, creates a Social Interaction Network (SIN). As such, we extend Facebook's current API in order to allow applications to retrieve a weighted graph instead of Facebooks unweighted graph. Finally, we evaluate the proposed platform based on completeness and speed of the crawled results from selected community pages. We also give a few example uses of our API on how it can be used by third party applications.