Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs

prostoalex writes "Business Week magazine is looking at social networking sites opening their APIs to third-party developers to enable social applications not supported by the network itself. Facebook is setting an example by releasing their API from beta into 1.0, and many others are expected to follow the suit. Quoting from the article: 'Since Facebook, a network of 17 million college students, started a pilot program last summer, third-party developers have created some 100 new applications. Now a Facebook user name and password can be used to log in to content-sharing and chat site Mosoto, and to automatically import Facebook friends into Mosoto's buddy list for chat. Facebook itself does not offer a chat function.'"

Comments

Great, when do we get a Slashdot API?

[psykocrime]

Great, when do we get a Slashdot API????

Re:Great, when do we get a Slashdot API?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the minute Slashdot becomes social. /ducks

myspace has already done this

[President_Camacho]

Business Week magazine is looking at social networking sites opening their APIs to third-party developers to enable social applications not supported by the network itself.

You mean Myspace doesn't have enough third-party "applications"?

Advaned Programming Interface

[Anonymous Coward]

RE: Social Networking Sites Opening Their APIs

Great, now if I could just find a woman on one to open her API

Re:Advaned Programming Interface

[Misch]

From thinkgeek:

Please note: Adding love.h to your partner object requires a few additional objects be streamed in before some functions are made available:

#include <love.h>

Partner significantOther;
Dinner dinner;
Flowers flowers;

significantOther << dinner << flowers;


Otherwise the call to significantOther.putOut() will throw an UninitializedMember() exception.

Re:Advaned Programming Interface

[Misch]

>man woman
No manual entry for woman

Re:Advaned Programming Interface

[Anubis350]

$ whatis woman
woman: nothing appropriate

Social Networking Protocol

[Carthag]

For a while now I've been hoping that a general protocol would come out and replace the centralized networking sites. It would be fairly trivial to create a handshaking system over a simple p2p network that allows you to set the friend-status of other nodes. These nodes would then be able to access a local profile based on their status. The profile could contain pretty much anything that the user wishes to include in it. It'd have to be user-friendly though. Of course the hand-shaking needs to be secure so people can't crawl the network for personal information, but that could possibly be done with public/private keys or a similar scheme.

I don't have time to code any of this, though, but it would be a million times more efficient than the current system where you have some friends on some sites and some friends on others.

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[Bogtha]

There's a decentralised RDF-based "Semantic Web"-type version in the form of FOAF. You can already browse it with software like FOAFnaut etc, and generate your own FOAF file with FOAF-a-matic. There was a crawler called Plink, but that seems to be dead now.

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[drinkypoo]

It would be fairly trivial to create a handshaking system over a simple p2p network that allows you to set the friend-status of other nodes.

I can't tell if this makes sense or not. Please define "node" in this context.

If what you mean is another webserver, then I don't think this is at all necessary or in fact even desirable. I think what is necessary is simply exposing congruent properties. For example you need to provide a means for account validation from a hashed password without providing the password back to the caller, and you need to make various values available. This is best done with a standard format for information interchange, and I don't mean the american one.

In other words it would be best if in addition to any custom APIs provided, the sites also provided a standard one. It should be simple XML for back-and-forth compatibility. This is pretty much all that is needed for collaboration between them, provided you implement the authentication system. That way you can have an affiliation of any type of sites and share member between them.

Keep in mind, however, that most of these social networking sites will fight you with everything they have. They depend on attracting as many visitors as possible and convincing them to eschew all others, which is easy because most people would prefer not to flop between sites.

I still think the actual answer is just to run your own blog, and let google (and others) handle the social aspect. Why associate myself with myspace? Of course this is still hard for a lot of people, but it's getting easier all the time. For example I could go with a hosting provider with fantastico, install drupal (or wordpress or whatever) via that, and then use the appropriate functionality to tie myself in with a network of other like-engined sites. There are also modules for some of these to participate with others...

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[stickystyle]

That would be...

http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/

Re:Facebook

[cashman73]

Or, you can just sign up without having any particular affiliation. Facebook opened its doors to the general public sometime in September or October, 2006.

Above and beyond

[CLorox]

These open APIs are allowing developers to go so far beyond what Facebook was originally designed for, that it makes you wonder if these addins will spin off with their own system, eclipsing the original site. Mosoto http://www.mosoto.com/ doesn't just add IM style chat from your Facebook friends, but file sharing and streaming audio to everyone in your list as well.