Framework for Enabling User-Generated Content

Abstract: User-generated content, UGC, is a modern topic today and refers to media and creative works created by Internet users and posted on the Internet. More and more application developers wants to offer sharing functionalities in their applications and on their websites. The alternatives of doing so today are to use UGC platforms API, like Facebook and Twitter, to upload the content to that specific platform or to implement the framework ShareKit that enables the user to share their content on multiple social networks and platforms. If the application developer wants the user to upload the content to their own platform they have to implement the sharing functionality themselves. This thesis covers the development of a framework that enables user-generated content to be uploaded to the application owner’s choice of destination whether it is their own platform or someone else’s. By exploring the meaning of user-generated content, why people want to share and existing sharing applications, information as well as inspirations was gathered and used to design a prototype that was user-tested, redesigned and implemented. The result was a prototype of a framework implemented for the iPhone that provides an easy way for users to add, edit, rearrange and upload different types of content. User-generated content will increase in the future and the mobile part of UGC will be more and more important. People are going to want to be able to express themselves wherever they are. This makes the future for this framework bright since it makes it easy for application developers to enable sharing of user-generated content in their applications.