FaceMashup: An end-user development tool for social network data

Abstract

Every day, each active social network user produces and shares texts, images and videos. While developers can access such data through application programming interfaces (APIs) for creating games, visualizations and routines, end users have less control on such information. Their access is mediated by the social application features, which limits them in combining sources, filtering results and performing actions on groups of elements. In order to fill this gap, we introduce FaceMashup, an end user development (EUD) environment supporting the manipulation of the Facebook graph. We describe the tool interface, documenting the choices we made during the design iterations. Data types are represented through widgets containing user interface (UI) elements similar to those used in the social network application. Widgets can be connected with each other with the drag and drop of their inner fields, and the application updates their content. Finally, we report the results of a user-test on the FaceMashup prototype, which shows a good acceptance of the environment by end-users.