Tweetflows: flexible workflows with twitter

We present a lightweight coordination and collaboration platform, intertwining contemporary social networking platforms and SOA principles. The idea of our approach is to use Twitter as a platform for collaborations of human and software services in the context of workflows. We introduce primitives that provide SOA functionality like service discovery or service binding and illustrate how these primitives are embedded in Tweets. By using Tweets, we are able to reuse existing infrastructures and tools (e.g., twitter clients on mobile devices) for the communication between services and humans. Simultaneously, we exploit social network structures originating from Twitter follower networks in order to discover (human and software) resources that are required for the execution of a workflow. Finally, we are able to monitor the execution of workflows with Twitter, simply by following Tweets that represent the execution of a workflow.