Building Heterogeneous Social Software, or, “How dare you tweet my snapchat?”
Supervisors
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Abstract
Social apps today require everybody to use the same application (e.g. Snapchat) or at least the same protocol (e.g. Twitter/Tweetdeck).
This project explores how future social software could blur the boundaries between multiple social services by allowing the
abstraction of social protocols for exchanging social information, while preserving the norms and social expectations around
it. For example, Alice might send Bob a photo that should be deleted after its first viewing, and expect Bob to conform to
that desire; to receive a ‘seen’ and ‘deleted’ receipt; and for Bob to be able to respond. To support this, we would require
a novel language to express such social protocols and an architecture for allowing application designers to easily build complying
social apps.
