| Abstract [eng] |
Today the social aspects of the internet are possibly the most important for most of the users. It seems like almost everyone has an account on Facebook, LinkedIn or some other social networking site. This means that incorporating your application and services into these social networking sites can bring you more publicity and users. In this study we show how one could create a framework for working with multiple social network APIs. This framework is then used in conjunction with Ideas Bank system to explore the real world value of such functionality. While there are many examples of successful games or applications for simple users that incorporate into Facebook or other social networks, our example is that of a service made for business domain. Ideas Bank system is a way for people from management to get from their employees ideas for their projects or solutions to problems. The testing of the created framework showed that it is easier to use than native Facebook API. Adding support for OpenSocial containers also proved to be relatively simple, as much of the code from Facebook integration could be reused, due to the unification of the APIs through the framework. Finally, the results of the study on user behavior shows that as much as 25% - 30% of users came to the Ideas Bank system after finding out about it on Facebook, and 40% of all users tried to use the Facebook application, while 20% remained with it. However, these numbers might be too generous, since virtually no other form of advertising was done for the system, save for the word of mouth. |
