Enabling cross-site interactions in social networks

Abstract

Online social networks is one of the major technological phenomena on the Web 2.0. Hundreds of millions of people are posting articles, photos, and videos on their profiles and interacting with other people, but the sharing and interaction are limited within a same social network site. Although users can share some contents in a social network site with people outside of the social network site using a secret address of content, appropriate access control mechanisms are still not supported. To overcome this limitation, we propose a cross-site interaction framework x-mngr, allowing users to interact with users in other social network sites, with a cross-site access control policy, which enables users to specify policies that allow/deny access to their shared contents across social network sites. We also propose a partial mapping approach based on a supervised learning mechanism to map user’s identities across social network sites. We implemented our proposed framework through a photo album sharing application that shares user’s photos between Facebook and MySpace based on the cross-site access control policy that is defined by the content owner. Furthermore, we provide mechanisms to enable users to fuse user-mapping decisions that are provided by their friends or others in the social network. We implemented our framework and through extensive experimentation we prove the accuracy and precision of our proposed mechanisms.