Social Stream, a social network framework

Abstract

With the growing popularity of social network sites, it is appealing to develop social network frameworks (SNF) that alleviate the overhead associated with common social network features in social-enabled websites. This paper introduces Social Stream, a SNF. Social Stream has a modular architecture, mainly based in two supertypes. The first one is actor, which has the profile, establishes social relations and performs actions. The second one is object, which appears in the timeline and receives actor's actions. Besides, Social Stream provides several major blocks: the social network, the activities timeline, actions and audiences. Social Stream has been sucessful out-of-the-box as contact-oriented network. Besides, it has been applied to the Virtual Science Hub (ViSH), an excursions content-oriented social network build in the context the EU-founded project Global Excursions. Most of the modules in the framework have been reused with slight modifications. Moreover, the framework has proven to be flexible enough to support different relation models (i.e. user-defined lists and system-defined follow), to support the definition of new content types that seamlessly integrate with social network features and to be able to fully customize home and profiles pages in the SNS.