Social Media APIs and Their C# Counterparts

Whether it's talking about current events or sharing photos of a family vacation, the world is now addicted to social networks. Businesses recognize this, and these days every business wants social media addressed in their applications. Facebook, Twitter, and other sites provide powerful APIs you can use to harness the power of social networking in your own applications. However, most of these APIs tend to return data formatted in any number of syndication formats that can be quite painful to work with. Luckily, there are many free .NET based libraries that make interacting with these APIs a breeze. Over the next several weeks, I'll be posting some information and examples specific to some of these libraries. Here are a few of them now for your consumption...

TweetSharp

Twitter exposes its API in the form of three different APIs, two REST APIs and one Streaming API. These APIs can be queried by making HTTP GET/POST requests to a specific URL with some required parameters. Unfortunately, writing code to make these requests and parse the returned data can be quite a time consuming task. Luckily, Daniel Crenna and Jason Diller took it upon themselves to develop TweetSharp, a complete .NET library for microblogging platforms. Through the use of its fluent API, TweetSharp makes it easy to interact with services such as Twitter and Yammer.

<a href="http://www.tweetsharp.com/" id="e0hc" title="Click here">Click here to learn more about TweetSharp.
Click here to learn more about the Twitter API.

The Facebook Developer Toolkit

Facebook exposes its API in the form of a REST API and JavaScript API. Like Twitter, Facebook's REST API can be accessed by making HTTP GET/POST requests. The JavaScript API provides developers with a way to establish a connection between Facebook and their application via Facebook Connect while also allowing them to make calls to the REST API. Unfortunately, writing code to making these calls and parse their returned data may not be something you have time for. Fortunately for us, Microsoft now supports a project known as the Facebook Developer Toolkit. The Facebook Developer Toolkit exposes the Facebook API via an easy to use .NET interface and allows you to build Silverlight, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and WinForms applications with ease.

<a href="http://www.codeplex.com/FacebookToolkit" id="aczc" title="Click here">Click here to learn more about the Facebook Developer Toolkit.
Click here to learn more about the Facebook API.

Google Data .NET Client Library

YouTube and many other Google owned services expose their functionality through the use of the Google Data Protocol. This protocol, like the others I've discussed, is accessed via HTTP GET/POST requests and returns a response in XML. Fortunately for us, we will never have to interact with this protocol directly. Google actually provides and maintains several client libraries in a number of different programming languages. The <a href="http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/" id="a_n9" title="Google Data .NET Client Library">Google Data .NET Client Library provides the functionality you will need for interacting with the Data Protocol in .NET based applications.

<a href="http://code.google.com/p/google-gdata/" id="vgir" title="Click here">Click here to learn more about the Google Data .NET Client Library.
Click here to learn more about the Google Data Protocol.