A Platform Approach to Personalizing Web Applications with Social Network User Profiles

Application personalization holds the promise of enhancing the effectiveness of software, facilitating its use, and creating a stronger emotional bond with its users, thus contributing to a user-centered application experience. Traditionally, the development of personalized applications and the acquisition of quality user data as the basis for personalization have posed significant challenges. This article presents a novel experimental development and execution platform that enables a simple, general, systematic, and consistent approach to developing personalized Web applications according to long-term user characteristics. The platform leverages social network user profiles as a source of user characteristics. We describe the key conceptual and technical goals as well as the platform design challenges in detail. An example demonstrates the programming methodology and its benefits.