Working With Social Network APIs

Creating Vicinity Buzz naturally involved working with a the APIs of social networks. That information seemed worth sharing for those of you interested in writing any type of application that would integrate with a social network.

Developer Documentation

Any of the social networking sites you probably want to integrate with have developer api’s that are well documented. Here’s the starting points for a variety of services:

Working With JSON

All of these APIs are best used with JSON. If you’re not familiar, you can read up at json.org. It’s the notation for serialization of javascript objects, and object literals.

Where To Make the Call From

If you are working in a standard web page, you could call the api from document.ready (assuming you are using jquery). This is the approach I take on hoolihan.net, my personal homepage. There is a twitter feed on the right side.

If you have a bit more of an application, you may want to look at one of the many javascript frameworks that help you route events to actions. These are frameworks like backbone, knockout, spine, etc. There are also commercial variants like kendo, dojo, and sencha.

jQueryMobile is commonly paired with PhoneGap, and in that scenario, using something like backbone is a bit tricky. You may want to bring in a template binding library, but avoid routing.

Binding

jQuery.templates was one of the first good javascript template binders that I’m aware of, but there are now many different options. In the jQuery world, most of the momentum seems aimed at jsrender. Recently I’ve considered bring in knockout and only using the binding part, but I’m not far enough in to evaluate that direction.

API Keys

Unless you’re using the most basic parts of the API, you’ll probably need to register your app and get an API key. It’s a token that identifies your application. In the event of API abuse (too many calls, etc), they have information to contact you and analytics around the issue.

Open Authentication

This is a big topic, but if your application wants to use a social network to identify your users, this is possible via open authentication. If you are interested in this, get started here.

What Do You Think?

Are there any particular areas of the APIs that you’d like to see more detail about? Any conceptual parts that would warrant their own post? Let me know what you think below.