Social Network GatewayThese days, people are members of several different social communities; of which they manage a personal profile. This profile has to be manually updated on each of these communities individually. With the proliferation of social communities, this operation can become extremely time-consuming.
Set up bridges to social networks
Voxmobili has developed the Social Network Gateway (SNG), a solution that allows end-users to manage all their social networks at once, in one simple click.
SNG displays a list of all online social networks the end-user can is connected to (customizable by the operator). Once the end-user has selected its network, he will be asked to answer the credential challenge in order for the SNG to verify the account. SNG can be permanently delegated: once credential time out is reached, SNG can automatically request for a new time out.
SNG allows to:
- retrieve mass updates from all the social networks
- populate a central address book based on imported contacts from the social networks and retrieve updates only for these contacts
- see aggregated data from all networks on a single page.
- filter data per day, per contact and per network (depending on third party client abilities)
- import contacts from web mail services and thus populate their address book with both their contacts and profiles.
Social Network Gateway allows end-users to automatically update their profile on each of their social networks, with a single request, providing them with a simple way to manage their user profiles.
The related Voxmobili products are: Social Address Book (SAB), Social Home and Phonebook 2.0.
Centralize Access to online services
Social Network Gateway is a centralized place where connections to online services are maintained.
It can work as a proxy or can propose a single interface towards multiple networks by unifying their different APIs. Requests to SNG are translated into the language of each specific social network and then broadcasted. This separates the responsibilities and life cycle of social networks from more stable products such as the Social Address Book.
Notifications
Voxmobili Social Network Gateway allows third party applications (SNG client applications) to be notified upon changes in a particular end-user account.
As social networks do not implement push mode, SNG is polling the networks at a customizable frequency and pushing to third parties. SNG is also able to poll when requested by a third party.
The notification protocol is adaptable. The current implementation uses XML / HTTP, it is however possible to plug SOAP instead. The next release of the platform will support SIP Notify.
Architecture
The social network connector architecture has been designed with the following aims in mind:
- to ease the development of high performance messaging connectors.
- to provide a standard API for third parties.
- to free connectors tied to a specific release of messaging server and to be used in a completely different Java application (such as a Social Network Client Emulator).
- to allow similar connectors to work independently from each other.
- to allow hot plugging of new connectors
The social network connector architecture relies on the Java ClassLoader mechanism. This allows for external libraries to be loaded along with their dependencies without causing any conflicts.
