Developing Social Networks Mashups: An Overview of REST-Based APIs

The social networks have become in a powerful diffusion media in several fields such as communication, e-commerce and entertainment. However, the development of new applications that combine the functionality of different social networks with the purpose of providing added-value to users is not very common. In this context, a new kind of applications called mashups has emerged. A mashup is a web application that integrates data from multiple web sources in order to provide a unique service. Internal data sources, RSS/Atom feeds, Screen-Scraping and Web Services are some resources used by mashups. Nowadays, most of Web Services provided by social networks use the REST-based architectural style because it offers significant advantages in comparison with other technologies. The contribution of this paper is a review of REST-based APIs for the development of mashups that integrate well known social networks such as Youtube©, Picasa©, and Flickr©, among others. In addition, a set of 4 mashups were developed combining the APIs discussed. Also, this work provides a development guide to perform tasks such as extraction and combination from different data sources, as well as leads to the emergence of new ideas for developing web applications.