An analysis of social network connect services
This analysis identifies integration challenges for third-party developers working with multiple social network platforms, though it is an incremental descriptive study rather than a novel solution.
The authors analyzed authentication and API services across seven major social network platforms, finding that OAuth has emerged as the dominant protocol supporting three API types (client-side, server-side REST, and streaming), with JSON being the most common data format but significant variability in resource types and lack of standardization complicating third-party integration.
Social network platforms are increasingly becoming identity providers and a media for showing multiple types of activity from third-party web sites. In this article, we analyze the services provided by seven of the most popular social network platforms. Results show OAuth emerging as the authentication and authorization protocol, giving support to three types of APIs, client-side or Javascript, server-side or representational state transfer (REST) and streaming. JSON is the most popular format, but there a considerable variety of resource types and a lack of representation standard, which makes harder for the third-party developer integrating with several services.