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Towards Migration of User Profiles in the SONIC Online Social Network Federation

Authors:
Sebastian Göndör
Felix Beierle
Evren Kücükbayraktar
Hussam Hebbo
Senan Sharhan
Axel Küpper

Keywords: Online Social Networks, Social Profile Migration

Abstract:
As of today, even though there is a strong trend of Online Social Networks (OSNs) becoming the main communication medium, OSN platforms are still mostly proprietary, closed solutions, which are not capable to seamlessly communicate with each other. The research project SONIC (SOcial Network InterConnect) proposes a holistic standard for inter-platform communication to eradicate these gaps between OSN platforms. Yet, even with such a communication architecture, users are still bound to the platform they originally signed up with. We envision a mechanism that allows users to migrate their social profiles between OSN platforms at any time without losing any data or connections. To facilitate a seamless migration of a user's social profile from one OSN platform to another, we propose a standardized container format for social profile migration and a protocol for migration of the profile data. This allows users to move their social profiles to a new platform server without losing any data such as images or status messages. In order to uniquely identify social profiles across multiple platforms, a globally unique identifier (Global ID) is assigned to each profile. This way, social profiles, as well as references to such profiles can be kept intact when the location of the social profile has changed due to migration. To inform linked social profiles about the recently conducted migration of the profile, a Global Social Lookup System (GSLS) maintains a database of Social Records, which link the Global ID to the current profile location.

Pages: 1 to 5

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2015

Publication date: October 11, 2015

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4529

ISBN: 978-1-61208-432-9

Location: St. Julians, Malta

Dates: from October 11, 2015 to October 16, 2015