Social Media APIs: The new language of the web

Almost all Social Media services and "Web 2.0" applications provide some sort of Application Programming Interface, or API, that allows these services to communicate with each other as well as with many traditional software programs.

Using Twitter as an example, applications like TweetDeck and TwitterBerry use an API to communicate messages between them and the Twitter service itself. Other examples would be the automated publishing of comment notifications to Twitter by a blog, or the tracking of a contact's Twitter stream in a cutting edge CRM service like BatchBook (http://www.batchblue.com/product-info-supertags.html)

This presentation will give a non-technical overview and demonstration of the power of Social Media APIs and will also go over a few very simple programming examples of how a developer can build custom "mashups" to shape these services to your specific needs.

Single Presenter

7 questions to be answered:

1. How can information flow out of a Social Media service to another application?

2. How can information flow in to a Social Media service from another application?

3. What are some business cases for using Social Media APIs?

4. What are some fun & nifty ways to use a Social Media API to visualize the stream of conversations?

5. How will these APIs become even more important as users go more mobile and services become more location-aware?

6. What are the privacy/copyright/attribution issues that are starting to arise with the ubiquity of these services?

7. How can I (or my trusty programmers) begin using these APIs to enhance our organization's online presence?