1.
Uniting Online Social Networks
with Places and Things
Mike Blackstock, Rodger Lea
University of British Columbia
Adrian Friday
Lancaster University

2.
Key Trends Leading to a Social WoT
• The IoT unites the physical and digital world
• Cooltown and other large scale pervasive
computing systems
• Leverage web standards toward the Web of
Things
• Today social networks are user-centric and social
• User interaction and updates
• Trusted relationships
• User generated content

3.
Social Network Presence
Real World

4.
Social Network Presence
Real World

5.
Social Network Presence
Social Network
Real World

6.
Social Network Presence
Social Network
Real World

7.
Social Network Presence
Social Network
Real World

8.
Social Network Presence
Social Network
Real World

9.
Social Network Presence
Social Network
Real World

10.
Outline
• Common and unique features of online
social networks
• Current work linking OSNs with WoT
• Challenges toward stronger integration
• Current work and conclusions

11.
Key Features of OSNs
• Facebook
• Simple and consistent https://graph.facebook.com/me
REST API {
"id": "69...........",
• Notifications to certain
"name": "John Doe",
"first_name": "John",
"last_name": "Doe",
changes
"gender": "male",
"locale": "en_US"
• Container for canvas
}
https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes
applications

12.
Key Features
• Open Social
• Open specification
• Multiple compliance levels:
• basic connectivity to Social API Server
and Gadget Container
• Twitter
• Focus on followers, tweets and search

13.
Summary
User Id & Activity Trusted OAuth
Container RESTful API
Profile Feeds Relationships Security
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
✓ ✓ followers ✓ ✓

14.
OSN-WoT Related Work
• Foursquare, Latitude: location and check
ins with mobile devices
• Pachube: share, store, find feeds on the
web
• Social Access Controller: users and
groups for sharing things
• SENSE-SATION: OAuth and REST for
participative apps
• SenseShare: facebook for sharing sensors

15.
Stronger OSN-WoT Integration
• Stronger convergence
• brings new opportunities for interaction
between users, places and things
• Issues include
• Two way OSN-real world interaction
• Extending APIs and Programming Models
• User interface and human interaction

16.
Two-way OSN to Real World
Interaction
• Receive state updates and control things
• Dynamic thing-to-user and thing-to-place
relationships that mirror the world
• Registration and discovery of things

17.
Two-way Interaction Challenges
• Data integrity and timeliness
• consistent for all OSN users, update order is
important
• remote control and automation should be possible
• subscribe or follow thing and relationship updates
• how should things connect?
• via gateways or individually?
• is OAuth suitable when there is no UI on a thing?
• is it practical for users to individually connect and
authenticate everything they own?

18.
Extending Programming Model
• Extend APIs and models to include places,
and things
• physical and ownership relationships
• For example:
• Facebook Graph extensions
• New Open Social Services
• Twitter feeds for data from environments

19.
Programming Model Questions
• Location models and other meta data
• ‘Thing profiles’: folksonomies vs standard profiles
and interoperability
• How to deploy an API extensions?
• Open Social extensions: not popular
everywhere
• Facebook: propretary and closed
• Can we use existing hooks and extension
points? Social network overlay?

20.
Human Interaction Challenges
• OSN user interfaces for interacting with
places and things
• new container applications?
• Allow users to qualify relationships
• more than just ‘friend’, ‘follow’ and ‘like’
relationships
• Installations presenting OSNs in physical world
• bridge social networks with physical space
• interaction using situated sensors, actuators
and displays
• can public benefit while maintaining privacy
and autonomy?

21.
Current work
• Facebook applications for sensors and
actuators
• A “meta” social network integrating
Facebook, Twitter, Open Social & others
• Can experiment with new APIs and
interfaces.
• Interactive Community Displays
• social network displays in cafes
• tagging places and things
• used to initiate discussion and socializing

22.
Conclusion
• The Web of Things leveraged pioneering work in
ubicomp and pervasive computing
• Leveraging and extending Online Social Networks can
create a social WoT.
• To accomplish this:
• Enable two way interaction for dynamic place & thing
discovery and state
• Extend OSN APIs to include places, things and
relationships
• Extend user experience in both directions for real
world user interaction with OSNs

23.
Demo: WoT Canvas Apps
Canvas Pages
Custom Page Tabs