Automated screen saver with shared media

摘要

Embodiments of the present invention provide users in a social network with a screen saver constructed by media shared by their contacts and groups in a social network. The present invention provides a shared photo album that displays images from a user's own photo collection, and that of their social network automatically. For a user, the social network service queries its database to retrieve a list of photo sources. The sources of images may be online photo sharing services, other computers with photos on their local hard drives, and public peer-to-peer storage services. The images may be displayed to the user and optionally may be accompanied with information, such as the owner of the photo or descriptive phrases or comments about the photo. The social network service may be configured to continuously or periodically request photos to update the screen saver.

主权项

1. A method comprising:
providing, by a hardware processor, an overlay client on a first computing device, the overlay client to provide an interface between a service application on the first computing device and an online service; identifying a set of content sources associated with a first user comprising a local storage device of the first computing device; obtaining, via the overlay client, content from the set of content sources; receiving, by the overlay client, a poll request associated with the content from a message server, wherein the poll request comprises an instruction to perform a client-side data scraping operation; originating, by the hardware processor, a data request in response to the client-side data scraping operation; causing, by the overlay client, the service application to submit the data request to the online service in view of the poll request; and receiving a message associated with a second user from the online service in view of the data request, wherein the message corresponds to an activity of the online service, wherein the first user has previously engaged with the online service, and wherein the activity is of interest to the first user.