Twitter as a transport layer platform

Abstract

Internet messengers and social networks have become an integral part of modern digital life. We have in mind not only the interaction between individual users but also a variety of applications that exist in these applications. Typically, applications for social networks use the universal login system and rely on data from social networks. Also, such applications are likely to get more traction when they are inside of the big social network like Facebook. At the same time, less attention is paid to communication capabilities of social networks. In this paper, we target Twitter as a messaging system at the first hand. We describe the way information systems can use Twitter as a transport layer for own services. Our work introduces a programmable service called 411 for Twitter, which supports user-defined and application-specific commands through tweets.