Wow! eBook – Blog

Book Description

Quick access to today’s top Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn resources – on business, entertainment, politics, health, sports, and much more!

• A single, up-to-the-minute source for all the best new resources on today’s top social networks
• More than 3,000 entries on parenting, shopping, fashion, sports, travel, religion, and many other topics
• A huge timesaver: helps users instantly uncover hidden “gems” they’d otherwise have to search for, stumble upon, or never find at all!

About the Author
Jeffery A. Riley, President of Box Twelve Communications, Inc. (www.boxtwelve.com), earned a technical journalism degree from Oregon State University in 1989 and is a former staff writer of the Los Angeles Times. A 15-year veteran of the information technology publishing industry, Jeff has had a hand in–as copy editor, production editor, development editor, acquisitions editor, executive editor, and author–hundreds of books covering IT topics.He is the author of Introduction to OpenOffice.org (Prentice Hall) and Picture Yourself Learning Microsoft Excel 2010 (Cengage Learning). As president of Box Twelve, he manages the day-to-day operations of a content solutions firm outside Hilton Head, South Carolina. You can follow his tweets at box12comm and view his LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com/in/jefferyriley. Download Now »

Book Description

In The Developer’s Guide to Social Programming, Mark Hawker shows developers how to build applications that integrate with the major social networking sites. Unlike competitive books that focus on a single social media platform, this book covers all three leading platforms: Facebook, OpenSocial, and Twitter. Hawker identifies the characteristics of superior, highly engaging social media applications, and shows how to use the Facebook platform, Google Friend Connect, and the Twitter API to create them.

You’ll find practical solutions and code for addressing many common social programming challenges, from site registration to search, blog commenting to creating location-based applications. Hawker concludes by walking you through building a complete, integrated social application: one that works seamlessly across all leading platforms, and draws on powerful features from each. Coverage includes

• Working with the Twitter API, including the Search API, Lists API, and Retweets API
• Authenticating users with Twitter OAuth
• Mastering the Facebook API, FQL, and XFBML
• Utilizing the Facebook JavaScript Library for creating dynamic content, and animation
• Exploring the Google Friend Connect JavaScript API, and integrating with the OpenSocial API
• Using Facebook’s tools for sharing, social commenting, stream publishing, and live conversation
• Using the PHP OpenSocial Client Library with Google Friend Connect Download Now »

Book Description

Most users on the Internet have a few favorite Internet web applications that they use often and cannot do without. These popular applications often provide essential services that we need even while we don’t fully understand its features or how they work. Ruby empowers you to develop your own clones of such applications without much ordeal. Learning how these sites work and describing how they can be implemented enables you to move to the next step of customizing them and enabling your own version of these services.

This book shows the reader how to clone some of the Internet’s most popular applications in Ruby by first identifying their main features, and then showing example Ruby code to replicate this functionality.

While we understand that it connects us to our friends and people we want to meet up with, what is the common feature of a social network that makes it a social network? And how do these features work? This book is the answer to all these questions. It will provide a step-by-step explanation on how the application is designed and coded, and then how it is deployed to the Heroku cloud platform. This book’s main purpose is to break up popular Internet services such as TinyURL, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook to understand what makes it tick. Then using Ruby, the book describes how a minimal set of features for these sites can be modeled, built, and deployed on the Internet.

Break up and rewrite popular social networking and other Internet applications using Ruby

Download Now »

Book Description

The Web is increasingly happening in realtime. With websites such as Facebook and Twitter leading the way, users are coming to expect that all sites should serve content as it occurs — on smartphones as well as computers. This book shows you how to build realtime user experiences by adding chat, streaming content, and including more features on your site one piece at a time, without making big changes to the existing infrastructure. You’ll also learn how to serve realtime content beyond the browser.

Throughout the book are many practical JavaScript and Python examples that you can use on your site now. And in the final chapter, you’ll build a location-aware game that combines all of the technologies discussed.

• Use the latest realtime syndication technology, including PubSubHubbub
• Build dynamic widgets on your homepage to show realtime updates from several sources
• Learn how to use long polling to “push” content from your server to browsers
• Create an application using the Tornado web server that makes sense of massive amounts of streaming content
• Understand the unique requirements for setting up a basic chat service
• Use IM and SMS to enable users to interact with your site outside of a web browser
• Implement custom analytics to measure engagement in realtim

Table of Contents Download Now »

Book Description

There’s been plenty of hype about the “netroots,” and online activism on both the right and left. But most of it’s been celebratory, not practical. This is a practical, start to finish guide to promoting any cause and participating in any social movement on the social Web. Long-time activist and online community expert Tom Head covers everything you need to know about e-activism, including: ” Using the Web to find activism jobs and volunteer opportunities ” Using Google Alerts, RSS feeds, and other tools to stay informed ” Building cause-related web sites – even if you have practically no money or web experience ” Engaging effectively on social networking sites ” Promoting causes, events, or organizations without spamming ” Getting more attention and links for a cause ” Keeping allies informed via email, blogs, text messaging, and Twitter ” Organizing local activists using global media, and using online activism to support on-the-ground work ” Blogging to promote a cause: when it works, and when it’s not worth it ” Avoiding the common mistakes e-activists make.

About the Author
Tom Head is author or coauthor of 24 nonfiction books on a wide range of topics, including Civil Liberties: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009) and Get Your IT Degree and Get Ahead (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 2000). He covers civil liberties for About.com, a division of The New York Times Company with 34 million unique visitors per month, and also blogs on civil liberties issues in his home state of Mississippi via the Mississippi Human Rights Report. Download Now »

Book Description

The phenomenal success of the iPhone and the iPod touch has ushered in a “gold rush” for developers, but with well over 100,000 apps in the highly competitive App Store, it has become increasingly difficult for new apps to stand out in the crowd. Achieving consumer awareness and sales longevity for your iPhone app requires a lot of organization and some strategic planning. This book will show you how to incorporate marketing and business savvy into every aspect of the design and development process, giving your app the best possible chance of succeeding in the App Store.

The Business of iPhone App Development was written by experienced developers with business backgrounds, taking you step-by-step through cost-effective marketing techniques that have proven successful for professional iPhone app creators—perfect for independent developers on shoestring budgets. Although there are a few iPhone app marketing books on the horizon, they appear to tackle the subject from purely a marketer’s perspective. What makes this book unique is that it was written by developers for developers, showing you not only what to do, but also how to do it, complete with time-saving resources and ready-to-use code examples. No prior business knowledge is required. This is the book you wish you had read before you launched your first app!

What you’ll learn

• Transform your iPhone app into a powerful marketing tool with easy-to-use concepts and code examples.
• Analyze your ideas, research the competition, and identify your audience to evaluate sales potential.
• Protect your business and intellectual property and avoid potential legal hassles.

Download Now »