This is a blog post that has been sitting on my laptop, all written and ready for posting, for just about two months now. I worked on the post when Jeff posted his social extension for 4th and Mayor…but shelved it when the topic died down. When talking with my colleague, Larry Lieberman, about the topic, he convinced me to dust it off and post it…and also convinced me to make an appearance on Inside Windows Phone. I hope it better explains what the team shipped with 8.1. – CRS
With the new Windows Phone 8.1 release, a whole new class of social extensibility points are now available for developers. These new extensions begin to open up a new area of the phone to developers that were pretty closely held – the People and Photo hubs. While these new APIs add a number of highly requested social capabilities to the platform, the new extensions also seem to be a source of confusion.
As the team released the Windows Phone 8.1 preview and devs started digging into the new APIs, I started getting a number of questions on the topic (on social, in my inbox, and on the phone), and I started digging into the topic with the teams that built the features (admittedly, the topic was new to me and missing from all of my ‘what’s new in phone’ discussions so far). In my honest opinion, I found the new social capabilities in 8.1 pretty amazing.
As I haven’t seen much on the topic, I thought it was worth writing up a semi-quick blog post on the topic to explain what I found and to provide some pointers to related reference material. There’s just so much more richness to the subject than 140 characters can do it justice. 
By the end of the post, my hope is that the new extensions points are much clearer: not only what they are (and what they aren’t), but how you can get started taking advantage of them today.
Why social?
Windows Phone has always been, at the heart, a social phone. This value proposition was the one that resonated most to me, and is central to my ‘why I love my phone’ pitch. Using the People Hub and pinned groups, my phone connects me to the people that matter most in my life (via a couple live tiles), as well as to my broader social graph. At a glance, I can get everything that matters to me in one place, regardless of its source (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, email, or SMS).
The People Hub is magic. As a father of three and Seattle transplant (with all of my family back east), it makes it easy for me to share the day-to-day with my personal networks. Last month, that update was to share news of our girls taking their first steps. And I believe it goes without saying that I’m busy – and the People Hub enables me to get the low-down on my social graph without having to actually go a number of dedicated apps. Again – magic.
There were a couple limitations with this approach, however. While folks generally love the integrated experience, but wanted additional/deeper network-specific features in the native People Hub experience (e.g., to like a photo). And for our international customers, the deeply OS-integrated approach meant that the Windows Phone engineering team was then the only group that extend the integration to additional key social networks around the world.
What can be extended?
To open up the Windows Phone social hubs (the People Hub and the Photos Hub), the team built out a social extension framework to enable Windows Phone to light up anyone’s social graph. Over time, this approach should not only make it easy for social networks to extend the hubs, but also to bring flexibility that enables social networks to light up specialized integrations to our users.
With 8.1, there are three integration points that are opened up for app developers publishing into the Store:
- Social broadcasting: Apps can extend the ‘Me’ card to enable the user to choice and launch an app to checks in or post a social update. As I understand it, the documentation on these is still in the works, but Jeff Wilcox publicly shared out the source code for his Social Extension for 4th & Mayor app.
- Contact cards: Apps can still integrate with the contact cards to add and extend contacts in the phone’s address book. What is new in 8.1 is the ability to bind to the contact card using a ‘contact binding’ to place an app tile into the new ‘Connect’ pivot to contextually extend the contact. By implementing a contact binding, you provide the phone user with a way to display relevant information about that user (e.g., service username, user/gamer/karma score, relevant pictures, latest update) and provide a way to deep link into your app to immediately interact with that user.
- Photo Hub: For services that host user photos online, you can also now integrate your app into the Photos Hub, surfacing your app as a tile on the album pivot, enabling your users to jump right into their pictures on your service. This means being able to launch off from one place, the Photos Hub, into each and every connected photo sharing service, without having to navigate in and out of each and every app, looking for that one family picture that you want to show someone.
With the new social extensions, there’s a lot that you, as an app developer, can do to enrich the social lives of your users by surfacing relevant service information in-context. And the result is win-win: for you, you get discovered and launched more often; for your user, the functionality and experience they want is always at their fingertips.
And that’s not all…
Beyond these sweet new social extensions that you can use in your app, it’s worth calling out that you also have the Action Center, contextual awareness via Cortana, and all the yummy goodness of WNS and the new tile templates…with each of these topics totally worthy of a blog post unto itself.
As a developer, it’s really hard not to get excited about all of the new tools that Windows Phone 8.1 adds to an app developer’s toolkit. And as a social network user, it’s even harder to not get excited about all the innovative social experiences that developers can build using them…right there in that magical place called the People Hub.
