Leveraging the service bus paradigm for computer-mediated social communication interoperability

Computer-mediated communication can be defined as any form of human communication achieved through computer technology. From its beginnings, it has been shaping the way humans interact with each other, and it has influenced many areas of society. There exist a plethora of communication services enabling computer-mediated social communication (e.g., Skype, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Twitter, Slack, etc.). Based on personal preferences, users may prefer a communication service rather than another. As a result, users sharing same interests may not be able to interact since they are using incompatible technologies. To tackle this interoperability barrier, we propose the Social Communication Bus, a middleware solution targeted to enable the interaction between heterogeneous communication services. More precisely, the contribution of this paper is threefold: (i), we propose a survey of the various forms of computer-mediated social communication, and we make an analogy with the computing communication paradigms; (ii), we revisit the eXtensible Service Bus (XSB) that supports interoperability across computing interaction paradigms to provide a solution for computer-mediated social communication interoperability; and (iii), we present Social-MQ, an implementation of the Social Communication Bus that has been integrated into the AppCivist platform for participatory democracy.