According to our idea, the Uni4One is not a quite complex system. The key point of development is to understanding the APIs of recently popular social networks. Developers should focus on how to get data from Facebook and Twitter, or send information to them.

Normally, data stream flow between Uni4One and SNS (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) by JSON format. After request to SNS, the Uni4One server transfers the JSON array to readable information and sends them to frontend and display on web. The server is a PHP + MySQL platform.

The architecture diagram is demonstrated below:

A following screen shot illustrates the using of Facebook API:

Since we decided to work on a universal client for multiple social webs, the group have done some research on recently exist similar apps. One of a typical app is TweetDeck which has been introduced by previous blogs. Although it integrates Twitter and Facebook, there are some defects of the app.  Therefore, the aim of our design is to make better user experience.

TweetDeck is developed by Twitter, so the most functions of it are focus on Twitter unless News Feed.  Our app will be a web based service for most popular social networks.

Figure1 General Design

Add Account

On the first step, setting up your frequently used social network account to the service. Choose one of them as your default account for login.

Read and Write Post

Users can synchronous check all the post (tweets, news feed, etc.) from multiple social platforms (you can choose one, multiple or all of them), as well as compose new post.

Additionally, Users can comment on the post.

Searching

This function is for searching friends, relevant post from you, and your friends or all over the social platforms by keywords (Searching area can be set). This is different from TweetDeck which only search on Twitter.

Friends Connection

The service combines users’ friends from the multiple social webs automatically by their names. In addition, users can manual aggregate their particular friend with different nick name in different social networks.

Accessory Functions

Additional functions include:

Mentions – List of who mentioned you (@) and what is for;

Messages – Messages between users and their friends;

Events – List of what events a user have in multiple social networks.

Accessory Functions

Customize UI