CS298 Proposal

One Social

Sowmya Sampath (sowmya.sjsu@gmail.com)

Advisor: Dr. Chris Pollett

Committee Members: Dr. Teng Moh and Dr. Mark Stamp

Abstract:

The growth of Facebook and Twitter has made companies like Yahoo and Microsoft add these two social networking websites as modules (applications) in their respective home pages. However in their home pages, they exist as two different applications and do not interact with each other. In other words, the Facebook streams and Twitter tweets are shown in two different views and users are required to update both these modules separately. There is currently no application that show both the Facebook streams and Twitter tweets in a single view. Users find it difficult to manage and maintain both these social networks together [Schawbel2008]. The goal of this project is to build a social website, called One Social, where user's can view their Facebook streams and Twitter tweets in one single view and thereby easily organize and maintain their updates.

In One Social, users can enter a status message and can share it with both their Facebook and Twitter connections in just one click. Moreover, all the Facebook and Twitter comments for a status update will be grouped (or threaded) together when we display them in One Social view, to improve user experience [Cronin2009]. They will also be able to set various preferences on status sharing. Users can create a single One Social ID and link both their Facebook and Twitter IDs to this One Social ID. Hence forth, logging on to One Social will log on the user to both these social networks. We will be using the REST API's provided by both Facebook and Twitter to view and update stream data. Their API specifications are documented in [Facebook2006] and [Twitter2008]. One Social implementation does not stop with the integration of Facebook and Twitter, I also extend the implementation such that APIs coded provide a bridge of custom APIs for integrating Facebook and Twitter. So any future inclusion of a different social network would be just trivial. This challenging task of providing the bridge of custom APIs for integration makes me thrive to accomplish it.

CS297 Results

• Implemented curl and multicurl which helped me learn more about fetching multiple url data from websites.
• Implemented Facebook authentication process and Twitter authentication process.
• Implemented updation of status in Facebook.
• Implemented updation of status in Twitter.

Proposed Schedule

Key Deliverables:

• Software
  • Production ready front end display
  • Login with One social ID with linked Facebook and Twitter IDs
  • Write once and update to both Facebook and Twitter
  • Display Facebook stream and Twitter threaded tweets together
  • Framework of custom APIs to provide a bridge for future integrations
• Report
  • 298 Project Report
  • Code Documentation

Innovations and Challenges

• Architecture of Facebook and Twitter are designed differently. Hence integrating is going to be a challenge.
• Facebook redirection does not happen automatically.
• Security measures need to be provided with https in-order to gain trust of the user.
• Twitter does not thread messages, hence additional task of threading messages.

References:

[Facebook2006] Facebook Platform APIs - http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Main_Page - 2006

[Twitter2008] Twitter Platform APIs - http://apiwiki.twitter.com/ - 2008

[Cronin2009] Crucial UI features of Networking Sites - http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/03/9-crucial-ui-features-of-social-media-and-networking-sites/ - 2009

[Schawbel2008] Can you join too many networks? - http://mashable.com/2008/12/16/choosing-social-networks/ - 2008