Social networks have become extremely popular in recent years. A new requirement of connecting physical devices into social networks is emerging gradually. In this paper, we propose a case study to explore the effectiveness of connecting devices into mobile social networks for status monitoring and controlling. In our work, we developed iGreenhouse, a greenhouse can post its environment information automatically to the most popular mobile social networks Wechat in China, and Wechat users are able to remotely control the devices in the greenhouse easily.

Experiment results show that our proposed approach is feasible, cost-effective and flexible. Therefore our solution can provide an alternative ubiquitous platform for monitoring and controlling of connected devices.