Online social networking is one of the primary means to stay connected with your friends and family; but by no means does it stop at that. In the small amount of time social platforms have been around, they have seen tremendous growth both in their capabilities and in the number of users using them, and are gradually creeping into other commonly used digital platforms as well. With its growing reach, it has opened up a completely new kind of opportunity, which has the potential to reinvent the conventional ‘self-sufficient’ model of applications.
Now you can port a good part of your users’ social networking experience and its associated data into your apps, which can help you enhance your apps’ capabilities as well as revenues. With the kind of options made available by the social networking platforms to developers, making your apps truly personalised & ‘social’ has never been easier.
How do social networking platforms interact with external apps?
The best part about making your apps social is that you don’t need to do all the hard work yourself. All you need to do is to open your doors for them!
In addition to the usual status updates and tweets, people indirectly generate a lot of useful information when they interact with other entities in their online social networking environment. Every interaction taking place inside a social networking platform, the ‘objects’ involved and their meta data have IDs associated with them. In some cases, this information is summarised into concise structures or graphs. External agents can interact with these structures and graphs via APIs that are carefully designed to be secure as well easy-to-use for developers.
