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I'm writing a book for O'Reilly and I'd love you to comment on this outline, see earlier post for more information. Let me know what is missing and what examples you'd like to suggest for the book. Comment below or send me an email me at gavinbell dot com or zzgavin on twitter.

• On the internet vs part of the internet
• Amazon and google vs most publishers
• New York Times and The Guardian
• Seeing the wider internet
• Integrating with the wider internet
• Building an API
• Why make an API?
• People and objects, the stuff of social applications
• Collections, tags, places and time as containers for objects via API calls
• Services not sites, programmatic access to data, not page generation
• Interoperability and Snowflake APIs (your data is not that unique)
• API traffic volume to twitter / flickr
• Supporting activities, not implementing features
• Using your own public API to make your stuff
• Microformats and RSS (read only apis)
• Where appropriate, bulk usage better via api, so that data only can be sent, not images and css along for the ride
• HTML badges
• Your data on someone else’s site, simple and easy to use
• Writable APIs
• Authentication required
• Security and OAuth
• Latency
• Examples Flickr / Twitter / MovableType and blog apis
• Sticking with standards
• Identica and other apps mimicing the twitter API
• RSS, Atom and AtomPub
• API scaling issues
• XMPP
• queues
• Real time vs near realtime
• NY TIMES, Flickr panda bears
• Privacy and security around APIs, commercial aspects
• Developer community management (wikis, mailing lists etc)

• Integrating existing or competing projects (whatever the route)
• Multiapp integration
• Registration SSO - OpenID and OAuth
• User management
• Data migration headaches and how to avoid them
• Having one of everything, not duplicates
• Email notifications - managing your output from multiple applications
• Internal integration (message queuing)
• On the cheap polling RSS
• Database calls, fast and brittle
• Queues and message passing
• Dealing with multiple claims of authority
• Family of identifiers better than one?
• Search
• Single search databases (big solutions like MarkLogic)
• Cooperative approaches (polling multiple databases and integrating)
• Multiple content sources with a single search interface is a hard problem, common for many publishers
• Community and published content, blog vs publishing workflow tools, who wrote this?
• Integration with other people’s APIs
• Functionality for free from others FTW
• How to manage external dependancies on others APIs
• Understanding provider and consumer relationships for your application

I'll of course credit any contributions I use. many thanks, Gavin

I've mentioned before that I'm writing a book for O'Reilly, entitled Building Social Web Applications. It should be published this August. I've written quite a lot of it based on a mixture of interviews and conversations with people at conferences and in London. I'm now writing the more technical chapters and I need your help. I'm an interaction designer and product manager with a good head for technical detail, but being honest I don't write code daily. So it would be great if I can get your input into these three chapters.

• Writing the application
• Extending the application, APIs and integration
• Launching and evolving

The earlier chapters cover the questions of why are you building a social application and look at how people behave and interact with one another online. These three chapters cover how to implement and extend the application. The intent is not to give a lot of technical detail and reams of code, but to explore how social applications differ. They are not the same as building a content publishing system or an online shop. I've created some outlines to give a framework for what I think should be in the chapters, but please let me know what is missing.

I'm not interested in recommending a particular language or framework, nor one particular approach to scaling. I'm also interested in your opinions on centralisation vs distribution and federation. Examples that you can share and suggestions of content to include are most welcome. Dopplr, Flickr, Twitter and sites like LinkedIn or Facebook are the kinds of things I've been featuring, but I've also been looking at adding social features to newspapers, magazine and product companies.

I'm going to put the API and integration chapter up first, the other two, tomorrow. I want to start writing the chapters on the 23rd of March, so about ten days or so from now, so please let me know what you think. I'm zzgavin on twitter and I'll be talking about the book there too.