Moving towards "Relationship-Aware" Applications and Services: A Social Machine-Oriented Approach

The open, distributed approach of the Web and the relationship\´s prevalence of applications and services is transforming both the way we develop software and how they operate and interact with each other. As a result, a novel breed of applications is emerging, and consequently new mental models are needed to deal with them. In this paper, we weave "social" relationships into software, leading to the notion of "relationship-aware" software. Relationship-aware software uses the metaphor of human social relationships and, at the simplest level, is software whose behavior takes into account other software it interacts with. Here, we revisit the concept of relationship and extend the notion of Social Machines to establish a unifying abstraction model that is used for specifying relationship-aware applications and services. To engineer relationship-aware applications, this paper presents a guideline that address some issues related to the engineering exercise. In addition, an analysis describing Facebook as a relationship-aware Social Machine with 282 interaction views is also reported in the paper.