426 Int. J. Web Based Communities, Vol. 10, No. 4, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. The social web of things: enabling the interaction of people and things on social networks Bruno Cabral, Cibele Vasconcelos and Cássio V.S. Prazeres* Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Bahia, Brazil E-mail: brataoufba@gmail.com E-mail: cibelemsv@gmail.com E-mail: prazeres@dcc.ufba.br *Corresponding author Abstract: Web applications for social networks with similar objectives are now being used on the web by thousands of people. Concepts such as ‘scraps’, ‘virtual friends’, ‘communities’ and ‘groups’ are increasingly common among users of these applications. Nowadays, people use social networks as a medium to replicate on the web the kind of social activities they would carry out in the real world. However, in real life, people do not just interact with people, they also interact with refrigerators, microwaves, TVs, cars, cell phones, and the like. But in spite of it all, applications for social networks on the web have yet to successfully reproduce this kind of relationship. And so, this article will present an architecture and prototype for the integration of physical devices through the web of things in a social network, where users and devices interact in a similar fashion to how users interact in social networks. Keywords: web of things; interaction; social networks; social web of things. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Cabral, B., Vasconcelos, C. and Prazeres, C.V.S. (2014) ‘The social web of things: enabling the interaction of people and things on social networks’, Int. J. Web-Based Communities, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp.426–444. Biographical notes: Bruno Cabral is an undergraduate student in Computer Science at Federal University of Bahia. He is an active contributor of open source projects such as DreaMule, GNUnet and TOR. His academic research area includes software engineering with product lines and web of things. Personally, he is interested in developing anonymous censorship resistant systems to overcome the notorious problems of privacy that the internet is facing. Cibele Vasconcelos has received her Bachelor in Computer Science by Federal University of Bahia since 2012. She has worked in researches through many areas from information technology such as technology using to improve learning, predictive analysis, software engineering, social networks and web of things. Currently, she is working with processes in software engineering for web-based systems, including social networks and web of things. Cássio V.S. Prazeres is an Assistant Professor at Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). He holds a PhD in Computer Science from University of São Paulo. He has several publications in international conferences and journals. He is a