USNB: Enabling Universal Online Social Interactions

Online social network services (OSNSs) have become an integral part of our daily lives. At the same time, the aggressive market competition has led to the emergence of multiple competing siloed OSNSs that cannot interoperate. As a consequence, people face the burden of creating and managing multiple OSNS accounts and learning how to use them to stay connected. This paper is concerned with relieving users from such a burden by enabling universal online social interactions. The contributions of this paper span: (1) a model of the universal social network bus (USNB) for OSNS interoperability; (2) a prototype for universal online social interactions that builds upon the proposed model; and (3) a preliminary experimental evaluation involving 50 participants. Results show that people are positive about the solution as they are able to reach out a larger community of users independently of the OSNSs they use.