Wednesday Words: Application Programing Interface (API)

If you have a website/blog for your brand, you may have heard that there are various APIs for social media to use to integrate your website and or forums with that form of social media.  API is short for Application Programming Interface and it allows software applications to interact with other software applications.

With websites, you often have to work with various social media developer tools and their API to get plugins for that social media to work on your website.

A great example of use of social media API is Xenforo forums. They have a plugin which works with Facebook and Twitter's API's to allow users to register and login to forums via their social media accounts.

Another example is the "Like" widgets you can find on various Wordpress based sites (like mine here: http://www.gracesnoke.com ).  These all make use of APIs.

For more information, check out developer tools on Facebook and Twitter.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media. These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media. You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.

Wednesday Words: News Feed

Okay, so today's word is an easy one - and probably a gimme - but as there are people who may not know certain words or may still be new to social media, we'll go ahead and define "News Feed."

The generic, non-social-network-specific, definition is a feed full of news.  With social media, we can use the term "news" loosely.

For Facebook, your news feed is what you see when you first login to Facebook.  It's all the posts from friends and families that they've posted as well as some posts from the pages and people you follow/like.  With Facebook you have the choice of reading Top Stories or Most Recent - and yes, it has a tendency to default to Top Stories randomly when you aren't expecting it and you have to tell it to go back.

Twitter's News Feed is called Timeline - not to be confused with Facebook profile Timelines).  This is where you can see everyone's tweets and retweets of people you follow as well as sponsored Tweets you may be interested in.  This is different from your profile where you see only your tweets.

Google's news feed is your "home" page in Google+.

I'm not sure if there are other "news feeds" out there, but those are the three dominant ones.

Wednesday Words are a series of definitions released on Wednesday each week regarding a word found specific to Facebook's social media platform, or may be a generic word dealing with social media.  These definitions are to help provide you with a better understanding of common and uncommon terms associated with Facebook and social media.   You can find all the Wednesday Words by clicking on the Wednesday Words tag below.