Technical Limitations for Designing Applications for Social Media

Social media content is used in various applications for businesses, organizations and citizens. However, there are technical limitations for analyzing content from social media; these include the way how data can be gained and which safety regulations as well as query limitations have to be considered. They are of specific importance when designing applications for time critical scenarios, such as crisis management. This paper analyzes these limitations (in June 2014) for the most important social media. The selection of social media is based on the Monthly Active Users (MAU), which counts unique users over 30 days. Besides the identification of various limitations, this paper outlines approaches to access the data and summarizes design considerations.