Building Location-Based Service Based on Social Network API: An Example of Check-In App

With the rapid progress of sensing and tracking technology, more and more location-based services (LBS) and applications are nowadays available in the market. But while it is convenient to retrieve various kinds of information via LBS, it is not easy to build up LBS apps which support a large amount of users and information. Therefore, it is important for developers to utilize the free application programming interface (API) resources available on the Internet for harvesting the benefit of the cloud computing, particularly for individual developers who have limited resources. This research explores the benefits of building LBS service/application based on free APIs and service-oriented computing (SOC). Using a social check-in app as example, the design and implementation of a smartphone application using the proposed approach will be described in this article. Moreover, by comparing with some other smartphone applications which also provide check-in services, the advantages and potential value of our approach to integrating social network APIs and SOC concept will be discussed.