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.'"

Great, when do we get a Slashdot API?

[psykocrime (61037)]

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

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

[by Anonymous Coward]

Probably the minute Slashdot becomes social. /ducks

Re:

[Frosty Piss (770223)]

Probably the minute Slashdot becomes social.

Listen, you insensitive clod...

Re:

[TeamSPAM (166583)]

Why do you need one? Are you planning on making a dup detector or a dup submitter?

Re:

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

Is there a benefit to having a public API to social sites that does NOT involve advertisement, selling or other forms of commercial exploitation?

I'm thinking about the mosoto thing. OK, it would be nice to be able to share files with online "friends" if it didn't open me up to lawsuits or jail. I wouldn't mind the idea of having streaming content that could be uploaded and shared among contacts like YouTube if it was something other than the beta test for an ad-supported replacement to commercial televisi

Re:

[AusIV (950840)]

Anything you want to know about how to interface with slashdot you can learn from slashcode [slashcode.com]. The wonders of open source.

How often will MySpace API Change?

[queenb**ch (446380)]

Consider the fact that Tom or what ever his name really is changes the software on Myspace.com about as often as I change my socks, I'm wondering how well that's going to work. Ask anyone who's ever tried writing something for the ebay API.

Furthermore the whole "online friends" site is sooooo jr high. I always get a mental image of a bunch of bow head cheerleaders standing around in the girls bathroom "Nuh-uh, I do so have more friends than you."

2 cents,

QueenB

myspace has already done this

[President_Camacho (1063384)]

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" [betanews.com]?

Advaned Programming Interface

[by 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 (158807)]

From thinkgeek [thinkgeek.com]:

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:

[MooUK (905450)]

Wouldn't an "uninitialised member" be more likely to be caused by insufficient attractiveness of the other party?

Re:

[Nahor (41537)]

significantOther << dinner << flowers;

Their idea of a romantic dinner is to eat flowers!? Or is it that they think their wives look like cows?

Re:

[Misch (158807)]

>man woman
No manual entry for woman

Re:

[Anubis350 (772791)]

$ whatis woman
woman: nothing appropriate

Re:

[Kjella (173770)]

>man woman
No manual entry for woman

Personally, I think they should throw a false error message like: "Preparing man entry... ERROR: Index too large" just to see how many who'd try to fix it :D

Facebook

[halltk1983 (855209)]

Are they still only for college kids? Or am I getting me social stal... networking sites mixed up again?

Re:Facebook

[cashman73 (855518)]

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.

Social Networking Protocol

[Carthag (643047)]

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:

[Bogtha (906264)]

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

Re:Social Networking Protocol

[drinkypoo (153816)]

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:

[Carthag (643047)]

I mean that each user/profile is a node in a p2p network. A seperate application, like an IM client, based on an open networking protocol. It could actually be integrated into your IM client across networks.

Re:

[jaydonnell (648194)]

It would be fairly trivial to create a handshaking system over a simple p2p network ... It'd have to be user-friendly though. Of course the hand-shaking needs to be secure

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Surely you jest.

Re:

[stickystyle (799509)]

That would be...

http://appleseed.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

Above and beyond

[CLorox (7)]

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/ [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.

flickr's API

[kisrael (134664)]

On a semi-related note, I just made a tool that scrapes flickr to extract flickr notes as an HTML imagemap [kisrael.com]. I started it as an HTML screenscraper but then saw there didn't seem to be support for this in the flickr api [flickr.com].