When writing a paper, authors often struggle with the application of their ideas in real life. It is often the case that an idea is interesting, but fails to convince others because of the lack of immediate applicability or a difficulty to provide real world data. This problem is faced by many authors; for example, in 1989 when Tim Berners Lee proposed an information system that later became the WWW, there was no proof that this could work.
So, in order to convince others, authors invent application scenarios that illustrate the application of their idea in a “realistic” setting. However, sometimes these settings are not well fitted and convincing. This was also one of the reasons for the rejection of our SOCA paper. So we thought of new scenarios and actually found them right away: we looked at our own marketing methods and we decided to describe them with with Tweetflows. The setting has completely changed and moved towards crowd sourcing without being a typical crowdsourcing example like tagging images. Instead, we are able to foster the ground for a new concept which we call social tuple space (STS) that is used to coordinate the services during the execution of the Tweetflow. Within this setting, we are able to describe a new working example as follows:

A startup company (ikangai solutions) is launching a new mobile app and as promotional offer they will give their customers a promotional discount, i.e., unlocking of additional App features for free, if customers invite the their friends to download the app. Customers can invite 5, 10, 20 or more friends from their social network to benefit from different promotions (bronze, silver, gold or platinum), with 5 being the lowest number for a promotion.
Customers can optionally customize their invitations before sending them to their friends. The invitation contains a link to a marketing survey which will be collected by the ikangai solutions to get feedback for the app (e.g., if the app was downloaded). Once the invited friends have completed the online survey, the customer receives the promotion code and can unlock new features in the App.
For the promotion, ikangai solutions uses its own Twitter network and posts a Tweetflow that describes the necessary activities needing to be executed:

LG didStart.Tweetflow #app_marketing
SR @cerridan download.App http://www.ikangai.com/ #app_marketing
SR @cerridan select.friends #twitter #app_marketing
[SR @cerridan select.Friend | SR @cerridan customize.Invitation | SR @cerridan send.Invitation | SR (Friend) confirm.Invitation | SR (Friend) complete.Survey http://wwww.ikangai.com | SR @cerridan send.Info] {5,} #app_marketing
SR @ikangai unlock.Bronze {5} #app_marketing
SR @ikangai unlock.Silver {10} #app_marketing
SR @ikangai unlock.Gold {20} #app_marketing
SR @ikangai unlock.Platinum {21,} #app_marketing

Conceptually, these commands create a social tuple space that contains Tweets of the followers of ikangai solutions. These Tweets represent information tuples that are used to coordinate the execution of the Tweetflow. The tuple space exists as temporary space: as long as the Tweetflow is executed, the Tweets are available. The Tweets are automatically purged from the social tuple space as Twitter only retains a history of about 3000 Tweets for each user. The creator of the tuple space monitors the execution by following the Tweets of the users:

LG @ikangai didSelect.Friend #app_marketing
LG @ikangai didCustomize.Invitation #app_marketing
LG @ikangai didSend.Invitation #app_marketing
LG @cerridan didConfirm.Invitation #app_marketing
LG @cerridan didComplete.Survey #app_marketing
LG @ikangai didSend.Info #app_marketing
…
LG @cerridan didUnlock.Bronze #app_marketing
LG @cerridan didFinish.Tweetflow #app_marketing

We believe that this example is illustrative and clearly motivates the use of Tweetflows in such settings. One of the next steps is to elaborate on social tuple spaces and to provide a simulation of Tweetflows in the Twitter Testbed of Andreas Scharf.

your ikangai science team

Tags: PhD, Public Paper Writing, Social Tuple Space, Twitter for Team Collaboration, Working Example