Social Networking of the Smart Home Andreas Kamilaris Department of Computer Science Networks Research Laboratory University of Cyprus P.O. Box 20537, Nicosia, CY 1678, Cyprus Email: kami@cs.ucy.ac.cy Andreas Pitsillides Department of Computer Science Networks Research Laboratory University of Cyprus P.O. Box 20537, Nicosia, CY 1678, Cyprus Email: andreas.pitsillides@ucy.ac.cy Abstract—Social networking on the Web has become an inte- gral part of our lives. Merging of computing with physical things enabled the conversion of everyday objects into information appliances. This merging allows Smart Homes to offer new automation possibilities to their residents. We propose utilizing existing social networking infrastructures and their Web-based APIs in order to integrate Smart Homes to the Web, offering social status to physical devices. We exploit the functionality and the Web 2.0 technologies provided by Facebook to transform the interaction with the Smart Home into a shared, social experience. A preliminary technical evaluation indicates that our approach is feasible and it offers acceptable performance. Index Terms—Smart Home; Social Networking Sites; Face- book; Pervasive Computing; Embedded Devices; Information Appliances; Web Services; REST; I. I NTRODUCTION Social Networking Sites (SNS) have penetrated deeply in our lives, enabling collaboration and sharing on the World Wide Web. Their evolvement has allowed millions of people worldwide to communicate, exchange content and extend their social networks through highly interactive, Web-based interfaces. According to [2], two-thirds of the world’s Internet popula- tion visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all Internet time. Currently, Facebook is the world’s most popular SNS with more than 400 million active users 1 . Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience, transforming the Web 2.0 into a social Web, in which human social capabilities are boosted. On the other hand, the latest years we witness a merging of computing with physical objects. Physical things such as household appliances are equipped with embedded micro- processors and they offer some small-range, wireless com- munication abilities. This merging introduces to the concept of information appliances [4], defined as devices or ma- chines, designed to perform some specific functionality but are usable, at the same time, for the purposes of computing. This technological trend comes to justify the vision of the Disappearing Computer [25]. As Mark Weiser points out, ”the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it”. 1 http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics In the future, Smart Homes will offer new automation possibilities to their residents. Information processing will be thoroughly integrated into everyday objects, which will transform the home into a shared space that pervasively interacts with its habitants. In this paper, we intend to combine these two tendencies, namely the popularity of online social networking and the introduction of information appliances in our lives in order to develop a Smart Home that presents social behavior. Our goal is to extend the social relationships between people to social relationships with their physical devices. Our main contribution is to examine the possibilities of leveraging existing online social networking infrastructures in order to transform the interaction with the Smart Home into a shared, social experience. We dedicate our efforts in exploiting the functionality and the technologies provided by SNS, to enable Smart Homes blend smoothly with the future Web, by means of socialization. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: in Section II we present the main concepts and the architecture of our approach and in Section III we describe our implementation efforts. Next, a short evaluation of the system is performed in Section IV and related work previously performed is identified in Section V. At last, in Section VI we discuss future work and conclude the paper. II. BUILDING SOCIAL SMART HOMES In this section, we describe the core ideas that drive our initiatives. We begin with a general presentation of SNS, their capabilities and the technologies they employ. Then, we consider ways of enabling information appliances to the Web and at last, we define our architectural model for integrating the Smart Home to the existing social networking applications. A. The evolvement of Social Networking Sites The popularity of SNS has increased enormously the last few years, attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers. Social networking popularity has even exceeded that of the email service. Some of the most popular SNS that are widely used worldwide are Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn A SNS essentially consists of a representation of each user (called his Profile), the social links that represent his friendship