One of the big new features in Appcelerator Titanium 0.7 is the introduction of native social APIs: Yahoo YQL, Facebook Connect, and Twitter. If you haven’t already seen Jeff’s recent video on this topic, I’d highly recommend you watch it. Kitchen Sink, the sample application that includes code and examples of all Titanium API’s in action, has also been updated. Check out the code examples section on Codestrong to grab the latest copy. And remember, 0.6 introduced native support for the iPhone and Android’s email client, so be sure to leverage this API as well when you’re adding social to your apps.
If you haven’t tried Yahoo’s YQL yet, you should. You can access over 300 Yahoo and popular 3rd-party APIs through a common SQL-like query. This makes for a much easer, and more standard, method of accessing information across the web. So in addition to your Flickr, Yahoo Weather, and Yahoo Finance kinds of information, you can also integrate your app with New York Times, Amazon, Craigslist, Zillow, and more. We’ve also included a sample O-auth implementation as part of our YQL integration to make accessing YQL services easy.
Facebook Connect gives you fully-authenticated access to Facebook’s social graph and related user information. Add Facebook-enabled presence feedback to show when users are online; push photos or status updates to a Facebook user’s account, or share data between Titanium-enabled Facebook applications with web-based Facebook apps.
Finally, we’ve included sample code in Kitchen Sink for pushing Tweets through twitter.com. Although possible prior to 0.7, this gives you reference code to drop into your project and try out.
From talking to a lot of customers and partners, I’m certain that almost every Titanium application out there could benefit from tapping into at least one of these APIs. One of the strengths of the platform is extending the web experience onto mobile devices, so be sure to check out these new APIs!
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Awesome.
Any idea when we’ll see FB, YQL for desktop?
Hi Andrew – you should see FB, YQL for desktop in the next few weeks.