Middleware for Information Exchange in Heterogeneous Social Network

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the design and implementation of a middleware that will facilitate the development of new social networks with a new information exchange layer. This layer will allow new social networks to send and receive information from heterogeneous existing social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Linked In) in a transparent way. The layer functions include the most common actions in a social network and a module to build and organize the complete users friendship graph integrating all the information coming from heterogeneous social networks. This layer provides homogeneous methods that are similar in different networks, saving software developers from the implementation of a wrapper for every different social network. Middleware details and results obtained with a prototype implementation are presented.