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Supporting asymmetric interaction in the age of social media

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Abstract

Supporting asymmetric social interaction is a key requirement for developers of ad hoc social applications, who need to keep up with the pace of the evolution of social media technology without leaving digital orphans on the road. This asymmetry becomes more evident in intergenerational social communication and it has been recognized as an open problem given the lack of interoperability among the social media platforms. The quick evolution and diversification of these platforms help increase this asymmetry. On the one hand, this situation impacts the developers of ad hoc social applications, who have to keep updating their systems. On the other hand, the end-users of these applications are affected as well, given that they depend on the developers to continue interacting with such platforms. This manuscript presents social message translator (SMT), a software system that allows addressing the interaction asymmetry between ad hoc social applications and regular social media platforms. The message translation mechanisms of SMT, its security, and the usability and extensibility of its services were evaluated through three empirical studies. The obtained results are highly positive, showing that SMT goes one step forward in the development of socio-domestic computing systems to support asymmetric social interaction.

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Notes

  1. http://mashable.com/2015/03/25/whatsapp-developers-api/#4YPSIE8ErOqw.

  2. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api.

  3. https://dev.skype.com.

  4. https://core.telegram.org/.

  5. https://xmpp.org.

  6. A detailed description of SMT and its API is available at: https://farodrig.github.io/SocialTranslator/.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by FONDECYT Regular (Chile) under Grant # 1191516.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Chile, Beauchef 851, North Building, Third Floor, Santiago, Chile

    Felipe Rodríguez, Sergio F. Ochoa & Francisco J. Gutierrez

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  1. Felipe Rodríguez
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  2. Sergio F. Ochoa
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  3. Francisco J. Gutierrez
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Correspondence to Sergio F. Ochoa.

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Rodríguez, F., Ochoa, S.F. & Gutierrez, F.J. Supporting asymmetric interaction in the age of social media. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 13, 5391–5404 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01641-3

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