SONIC: Bridging the Gap between Different Online Social Network Platforms

Abstract

Online Social Network (OSN) platforms have become an important part of our everyday online lives. We communicate, share content, and organize meetings and events using social platforms and services. However, even though there is a strong trend towards OSN services to become the main communication medium, most OSN platforms are still proprietary, closed services that keep users from connecting directly and seamlessly to the services of other OSN platforms. The resulting lock-in effects are intentionally created by OSN operators, as their business models are built mostly on targeted advertisement services. While open and decentralized communication protocols exist for most other aspects of digital social interaction, there are only few micro-standards and protocols in existence for the social web. A holistic standard is yet missing. We envision a truly open and decentralized ecosystem of OSN platforms, where users are not cut off from friends using other social platforms and can freely migrate from one OSN platform to another at any time without losing established relationships in the social graph. This would allow users to freely choose an OSN platform of their liking instead of being limited in their choice to the platform used by one's friends. In this paper, we give an overview about the SOcial Network InterConnect protocol (SONIC), a novel social protocol for seamless social cross-platform communication. SONIC proposes a decentralized and heterogeneous Online Social Network Federation (OSNF), in which platforms are connected via a communication protocol. This allows different OSN platforms to seamlessly communicate with each other, while giving users the ability to migrate social profiles between platforms on demand without losing previously established connections to other user profiles.