Programming Social Applications

Conclusion

Whether you are seeking a standard way to publish and consume activities through the Activity Streams protocol or building an advanced provider/subscriber comment-sharing network via PubSubHubbub and the Salmon protocol, it’s obvious that distributed web frameworks help us standardize the way we handle many of our regular social interactions.

Through our exploration of these protocols in this chapter, we have:

• Learned how we can turn a traditional website into a rich source of entity metadata by using the Open Graph protocol

• Explored how to standardize and consume activities through the use of Activity Streams, which enables us to pull detailed information about all parties involved in an activity

• Discovered how the WebFinger protocol turns a simple email address into a useful source of a user’s social information

• Examined how we can build a standard method for sharing URL-based content with any other service on the Web

• Built complex provider/subscriber systems that allow for a rich network of cross-communication between numerous sites via PubSubHubbub and the Salmon protocol

These open protocols define methods that can help you increase your social influence on the Web and go a long way toward delivering truly engaging social networks between multiple sites and services.