Rapid Development of Interactive Applications Based on Online Social Networks

Online social networks, like Twitter or Google+, are widely used for all kind of purposes, and the proliferation of smartphones enables their use anywhere, anytime. The instant messaging capabilities of these services are used in an ad-hoc way for social activities, like organizing meetings or gathering preferences among a group of friends, or as a means to contact community managers of companies or services.

Provided with automation mechanisms, posts (messages in social networks) can be used as a dialogue mechanism between users and computer applications. In this paper we propose the concept of post-based application, an application that uses short messages as a medium to obtain input commands from users and produce outputs, describing several scenarios where these applications are of interest. In addition, we provide an automated,

Model-Driven Engineering

approach (currently targeting Twitter) for their rapid construction, including dedicated Domain-Specific Languages to express the interesting parts to be detected in posts; and query matched posts, aggregate information or synthesize posts.