Programming Social Applications

Glossary

activity

An activity is a piece of content (e.g., text, image, video) that a user shares through a consumable stream of activities. This stream may consist of the activities of a single user or an amalgamation of many people, sorted by criteria such as friendships or location (for example, a user’s Facebook news feed contains a series of activities from her friends).

AJAX

AJAX is an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, although many implementations favor JSON over XML. It defines a series of interrelated web development technologies that allow developers to construct dynamic web applications.

More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_(programming).

connection

In terms of a social profile, a connection is a reciprocated relationship between two individuals. Both parties have to accept this “friendship” link to build a connection. Being part of a connection usually gives both individuals additional privileges to view and consume more information about each other from their respective profiles.

container

Container is the term used to describe a social networking site that allows developers to build applications on top of it. Well-known social networking containers are Facebook, YAP, iGoogle, and Orkut.

distributed web framework

Distributed web frameworks, as used in this text, refer to a series of open protocols and specifications that promote the syndication of content and entity cross-communication on the Web.

gadget

In the context of OpenSocial, all applications that ...