Link Together™ Official Blog » mashup http://blog.linktogether.com Find Out What's Going On With Link Together Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:45:02 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v= en hourly 1 Wiring Into Social Networking Sites http://blog.linktogether.com/2009/06/02/wiring-into-social-networking-sites/ http://blog.linktogether.com/2009/06/02/wiring-into-social-networking-sites/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:29:20 +0000 admin http://blog.linktogether.com/?p=319 Two clear success stories on the web over the past five years have been the explosion of social networking sites and the popularity of mashups which essentially combine services and/or content from multiple online sources into a single site.  If you’ve got a great idea for a new site or online resource and are looking to quickly add a great deal of power and functionality to it without reinventing the wheel, you have to look no further than the services provided by social networking giants such as Facebook, Friendster, and even the New York Times (http://blog.programmableweb.com/2009/02/18/the-new-york-times-releases-a-social-network-api).  Of course, an entirely separate option that is increasingly popular with many developers is to simply skip the construction of your own unique site and instead build applications that run 100% on the social networking site itself.

From a development standpoint, the common access mechanism for all of these integrations is a set of well-defined APIs typically delivered via REST Web Services (for more information on REST, visit http://www.xfront.com/REST-Web-Services.html).  These services are always accessed over HTTP and some sites provide APIs in popular development technologies such as PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby, or Python.  For example, a quick glance at the Facebook developer site (http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Main_Page) reveals support for the following client libraries at the time of this writing:

•    PHP
•    JavaScript
•    Connect for iPhone
•    Flash/ActionScript
•    ASP.NET
•    ASP (VBScript)
•    Cocoa
•    ColdFusion
•    C++
•    C#
•    D
•    Emacs Lisp
•    Erlang
•    Google Web Toolkit
•    Java
•    Lisp
•    Perl
•    Python
•    Ruby On Rails
•    VB.NET
•    Windows Mobile

When a single platform offers that many opportunities for developers to hook into it, I think it’s fair to say that it’s highly stable and something every developer seeking to build a community-based site should think about hooking into.  The following links take you to developer sites for some of the more popular social networking sites:

•    Facebook – http://wiki.developers.facebook.com
•    MySpace – http://developer.myspace.com
•    Microsoft Live – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/live/default.aspx
•    OpenSocial – http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial

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