The Software & Apps Development category focuses on technologies behind social platforms, applications, and digital services. Here you’ll find articles about new tools, platform updates, APIs, product launches, and development trends related to social media and online ecosystems.
This section is intended for developers, product managers, and tech-focused readers who want to understand how social technologies are built, improved, and scaled.
Discover public user profiles across social networks
Users Search allows you to look up people by name or username and find publicly available social media profiles across multiple platforms, helping you research identities and cross-platform presence.
Explore public Facebook content outside the Facebook platform
The Unofficial Facebook Viewer makes it possible to view publicly accessible Facebook posts, profiles, and pages without using the standard Facebook interface, useful for research and development insights.
Yesterday Twitter officially announced retirement of the API v1.
Exploring developers forums shows that lots of third party services owners are unhappy with the new API limitations and Twitter’s requirement for applications to authenticate all the requests. At the same time Twitter representatives report: most of the valuable services that utilizes the API, successfully migrated their stuff.
Quick overview of the most mentioned Twitter tools gives reason to doubt in this statement.
Facebook launches online apps store with games and other applications intended for use in the social network.
Facebook users can access the Facebook App Center through the Internet and Facebook application for iOS and Android. This should help Facebook to monetize its mobile audience. Now it will be hard to say about Google-Apple monopoly in selling mobile apps.
Yesterday, Facebook introduced the new function, which is called “Action Link”. This link will appear next to the Like and Comment ones, but its main purpose will be to “interact with your timeline app directly from Facebook.”
The social network has finally launched its Timeline Apps platform, which includes a variety of applications based on Open Graph API.
This platform, which was announced last September on the F8 conference, allows third party developers and companies to build Facebook applications that can post information about any events in the life of the user, his interests, habits and preferences. What exactly should see other Facebook users, you can configure using applications settings.
If you are a Facebook account holder, then pressing the Like button will cause the appearance of the data marked with this Like button on the wall of your profile page. Your Facebook friends will also be familiarized with the contents behind the mentioned button. In the meantime the original button’s owner becomes enabled to publish updates of news feed concerning the Liked object to the user hereafter.
Application developers are now provided with a new tool by the social networking site. They are now empowered to batch requests whence it follows that they are allowed to access the Graph API more efficiently. The number of requests possible to be batched comes up to 20. Developers can also batch multiple HTTP methods and FQL queries, and are enabled to order operations to specify connections involved.
Comments Box social plugin on Facebook was considerably changed a short time ago. First of all it performs particular waveforms with the purpose to provide appropriate remarks. Besides the new system empowers the admins to delete indecent and unbecoming comments. Act of logging by users to plugin either through the social network or Yahoo! brings about announcement of user’s remarks on the wall.
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According to a recent statement of Facebook developers, FBML and FBJS will be depreciated since March 11, 2011 and Page tab applications are going to be built and implemented using iframes. Both canvas and tab applications are supposed to be built on the same programming model. In addition to that iframes will allow integrating social plugins and the Graph API into tab apps.
Lately one of the co-founders of Walletin, named Cory Ondrejka, joined Facebook. He seems to be getting on a treat because the platform’s advocate of HTML5 is going forward. The object pursued by Facebook is to incline developers to choose HTML5 over building native iOS or Android apps. Pursuing of this goal allows the company to avoid relatively closed intermediate members like Apple when it intend to introduce new platform functionality or bring products like Credits to mobile games.
