REST APIs for Emerging Social Media Platforms

Abstract

People are quite acquainted with the emerging social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest©, and LinkedIn. Many web developers and technical industry professionals are using these websites and applications consistently but may not be aware of the types of APIs and supported tools available and used for leading social networking platforms. Social networking sites have millions of active users who discover and share an enormous amount of user-generated content on a daily basis. Most of these platforms provide APIs and tools for web developers to incorporate social sharing into their applications and make it possible for the applications to leverage the features and functions of the platforms. Using these APIs and tools provided by social networking platforms, developers can build varied and innovative applications that feature social sign-ins, streaming real-time social data, social sharing and engagement, and much more. This paper represents a review and comparative study of REST APIs or APIs, in general, of the emerging social network platforms by discussing their API structure along with an overall understanding of the varied features these sites are born with or were improved to. Ultimately, we understand the reasons to why REST has become the building block of most APIs and is the eventual future.