Enabling Cross-Site Content Sharing between Social Networks

Social Networks is one of the major technological phenomena on the Web 2.0. Hundreds of millions of people are posting articles, photos, and videos on their profiles and interacting with other people, but the sharing and interaction are limited within a same social network site. Although users can share some contents in a social network site with people outside of the social network site using a public link of content, appropriate access control mechanisms are still not supported. To overcome those limitations, we propose a cross-site content sharing framework named x-mngr, allowing users to interact with others in other social network sites, with a cross-site access control policy, which enables users to specify policies that allow/deny access to their shared contents across social network sites. We implemented our proposed framework through a photo sharing application that shares user's photos between Face book and My Space based on the cross-site access control policy. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a user study for the x-mngr framework.