When someone mentions social networks, Facebook has to pop into your mind. Jonathan LeBlanc’s book, “Programming Social Applications”, would lead one to assume (yes, I know the dangers lurking there) that this would include Facebook. One would be wrong.

This interesting topic was inspired by the post in Information Week’s blog – The Brain Yard -titled, “Build Your Social Applications With Open Source.” If you want to create social applications based on standards and open source tools, sans Facebook, this book can be of great help. He acknowledges that the most difficult part of the process is design, and to design, you must have a social mindset. The protocols come easy, once you have adjusted to the fact that this is about social context and not just embedding code.

Melody K. Smith

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