A model to support multi-social-network applications

Abstract

It is not uncommon that people create multiple profiles in different social networks, spreading out over them personal information. This leads to a multi-social-network scenario where different social networks cannot be viewed as monads, but are strongly correlated to each other. Building a suitable middleware on top of social networks to support internetworking applications is an important challenge, as the global view of the social network world provides very powerful knowledge and opportunities. In this paper, we do a first important step towards this goal, by defining and implementing a model aimed at generalizing concepts, actions and relationships of existing social networks.