The Third-Party Applications Development Based on Social Network Open Platform

With the development of social networks, open platforms have achieved remarkable success all around the world. Many social networks have released their open platforms one after another, and a large number of third-party applications have been developed on these platforms. This identifies that Internet has step into the era in which user can develop their own applications from the era in which user only get information. This paper introduces the open platforms and its development approaches. Firstly, we introduce the open platform architecture of 3 popular social networks: Facebook, Renren and Sina Weibo. Then key technologies in third-part applications development are respectively illustrated, including hyper text transfer protocol, JavaScript, Ajax, XML, JSON and OAuth. Lastly, we show how to develop a third-party application in Sina Weibo by taking "get user's tweets" as an example. More and more people are trying to develop their own applications in social network open platforms nowadays. We hope this paper could help them understand the basic idea and main approaches, thus provide a good beginning for these developers.