Social infrastructure

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Social infrastructure

Social infrastructure is a general term referring to a class of internet services which allow websites or mobile devices to integrate social functionality into their application user experience. Such functionality includes social login, sharing, commenting, activity feeds, online identity storage, gamification and others.

Website set of related web pages served from a single web domain

A website or web site is a collection of related network web resources, such as web pages, multimedia content, which are typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server. Notable examples are wikipedia.org, google.com, and amazon.com.

A mobile device is a computing device small enough to hold and operate in the hand. Typically, any handheld computer device will have an LCD or OLED flatscreen interface, providing a touchscreen interface with digital buttons and keyboard or physical buttons along with a physical keyboard. Many such devices can connect to the Internet and interconnect with other devices such as car entertainment systems or headsets via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular networks or near field communication (NFC). Integrated cameras, digital media players, the ability to place and receive telephone calls, video games, and Global Positioning System (GPS) capabilities are common. Power is typically provided by a lithium battery. Mobile devices may run mobile operating systems that allow third-party apps specialized for said capabilities to be installed and run.

In commerce, user experience (UX) is a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service. It includes the practical, experiential, affective, meaningful and valuable aspects of human–computer interaction and product ownership. Additionally, it includes a person's perceptions of system aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency. User experience may be subjective in nature to the degree that it is about individual perception and thought with respect to a system. User experience varies dynamically, constantly modifying over time due to changing usage circumstances and to changes to individual systems as well as to the wider usage context in which they operate. In the end, user experience is about how a user interacts with, and experiences, a product.

Contents

The technologies and services comprising social infrastructure are made available by a variety of sources including social network providers such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google. Third-party providers provide services that allow applications to integrate social functionality using multiple social networks. While each provider offers a different range of social functionality to applications, all providers offer their own set of tools, plugins, SDKs and APIs to ensure their platform is accessible across as many devices as possible. Using standard programming languages (HTML, JavaScript, PHP, Java, Objective-C, etc.), applications can interface with social infrastructure from desktops, laptops, mobile phones and tablets. Indian ICT company United Telecoms Limited has implemented social infrastructure projects targeting health exchanges, tsunami warning systems, city surveillance, broadband and communication systems for rapid transportation systems.

Facebook Global online social networking service

Facebook, Inc. is an American online social media and social networking service company based in Menlo Park, California. It was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, along with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Twitter Global micro-blogging Internet service

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking service on which users post and interact with messages known as "tweets". Tweets were originally restricted to 140 characters, but on November 7, 2017, this limit was doubled to 280 for all languages except Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Users access Twitter through its website interface, through Short Message Service (SMS) or its mobile-device application software ("app"). Twitter, Inc. is based in San Francisco, California, and has more than 25 offices around the world.

LinkedIn Social networking website for people in professional occupations

LinkedIn is an American business and employment-oriented service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Founded on December 28, 2002, and launched on May 5, 2003, it is mainly used for professional networking, including employers posting jobs and job seekers posting their CVs. As of 2015, most of the company's revenue came from selling access to information about its members to recruiters and sales professionals. Since December 2016 it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. As of June 2019, LinkedIn had 630 million registered members in 200 countries.

Services and technologies

The various technologies that make up the social Infrastructure are meant to provide content owners the necessary “social network hooks” to enhance content within a website or application. [1]

Social login

Social login allows users to log into a website or application using their existing credentials on identity providers such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. Social login is a key technology of the social infrastructure since many of its services require establishing a valid identity before being used.

Sharing

Allows users to share or bookmark site content and send to friends on social networks. Popular social buttons such as Facebook Like, Twitter Tweet and Google +1 are commonly added to websites which lets users share content with a single mouse click or tap from a mobile device. Sharing “plugins” from vendors offer services that let users share content to multiple social networks at once.

Comments

Gives users the ability to post their comments and have discussions about site content. Users often have the option of broadcasting their comment to their activity feeds on social networks which link friends back to the site content.

Ratings/reviews

Provides users a way to give feedback on an article, blog post, product or any other type of content across a site or application. This can range anywhere from simple ratings (3 out of 5 stars) to written reviews. Typically, users have the option of sharing this feedback on their social networks.

Activity feeds

Also known as activity streams, activity feeds display to the user what their friends and other visitors have recently been doing on a site or application. The feed is typically updated when users do anything "social" such as share, post a comment, or earn a badge.

Live chat

This allows users to chat, comment and share activity in real-time. Live chat is typically used for live events such as webcasts, web chats and webinars. Due to technical complexities of live streaming, live chat is generally offered to sites as a plugin hosted on an SaaS model.

Gamification

Gamification takes concepts often found in games (points, badges, challenges, progress bars, rankings) and applies them to non-game websites and applications to make them more appealing. Pre-built plugins and GUI elements are often made available to display and manage the information.

Consumer identity data storage

Stores a combination of standard online profile data (name, city, email, gender) with social data (friends, likes, posts) to offer a more comprehensive picture of a user's demographics and preferences. Vendors such as Facebook, Twitter and Google capture and store information with permission from the user whose identity is self-asserted. [2] Some third-party vendors aggregate social identity information across multiple vendors.

Social analytics

Pulls data from one or more social networks and identity providers to deliver metrics and reporting about user social activity such as referral traffic, demographics, shares, social logins, or key influencers on the site. These metrics provide insights concerning user preferences and site activity.

Social APIs

Along with plugins and GUI elements, social networks generally allow sites to access raw social data more directly via an API. Most social networks provide REST and JavaScript APIs as well as mobile SDKs to their data. Some third-party services offer an abstracted API which accesses social data across multiple providers in a single call.

Security

Securing the social infrastructure means offering protection against common security threats such as data tampering, replay attacks and unauthorized access. Some of the measures typically found within social infrastructure services include:

OAuth

OAuth is an underlying concept of the social infrastructure is that in exchange for a more social experience, users grant websites and applications permission-based access to the users' social data. From a security standpoint, such permission is typically granted using OAuth. OAuth is a secure authorization protocol in which social networks provide a session token to third-party applications. Using this token, applications can make API calls to social networks on the user's behalf. Along with websites, OAuth has built in support for desktop applications and mobile devices. [3]

Application secret keys

A secret key is a cryptographic random number used as a shared secret between an application and a specific social infrastructure provider. Secret keys are passed (in one form or another) between the application and vendor on every API and serve as a virtual handshake that both parties are who they say they are.

Encrypted channels

Websites can load JavaScript libraries over a secure, encrypted channel (SSL). This helps to protect the social login process from exploits like man-in-the-middle attacks or eavesdroppers who use tools to capture session cookies.

Digital signatures

Most vendors and third-party services offers ways to detect whether userIDs have been tampered with by including a digitally signed token which can be validated by the site or application. Applications verify both data integrity and authenticity by digitally validating this token.

Friendship signatures

To prevent malicious users from tampering with friend list data and pretending to be friends of a user they're not actually friends with, some providers offer "friendship signatures". These friendship signatures digitally sign specific user data which a site or application can use to verify that two users are actually friends.

See also

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References

Further reading

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