4 Guidelines to Building Social Media Apps

Truth is, there are no rules set in stone to building applications revolving around social media. What is true is that there are a lot of them sprouting from the hedges these days. Some of them are built as a content platform, while others are built to supplement existing platforms.

1. It should have the function of an aggregator. Blogs have RSS feeds. You can grab these feeds and have them displayed in an easy to use home page tool like Pageflakes. With the rise of social media, your blog’s home page no longer is the main landing page. With the advent of FriendFeed, Twitter hashtags and yes even something as simple as cross posting your latest post to other blogs and social networks you own, your content becomes ubiquitous over the Internet given the fact that each of your social platforms may cater to a different target market. Developers should be able to see the value in making their users content as ubiquitous as possible.

2. “Social” should be beyond adding friends, generated because of true interest in a particular community. In the old days of MySpace and Friendster, the benefits of adding friends were really limited to being able to see each other’s profile. Today, the concept of building a community goes beyond having a friends list. If you do a Google search for “Friendster,” your top results include free custom themes made by community members. In the realm of mobile tech, you have Apple, Android and Nokia building a platform allowing a community of developers to converge by providing SDK’s for their operating platforms. In Twitter, a community is built upon hash tags to promote specific topics and advocacy.

3. Content can be imported and exported easily. Apart from Blogspot and WordPress, one of the better blogging tools out there is

Author: Jayvee Fernandez