{"id":145,"date":"2014-07-02T10:37:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T17:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/simpkins.social\/cliff\/?p=145"},"modified":"2025-03-04T10:40:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-04T18:40:20","slug":"socializing-your-app-in-windows-phone-8-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/simpkins.social\/cliff\/blog\/2014\/07\/02\/socializing-your-app-in-windows-phone-8-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Socializing your app in Windows Phone 8.1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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\u2026but shelved it when the topic died down. When talking with my colleague,\u00a0Larry Lieberman<\/a>, about the topic, he convinced me to dust it off and post it\u2026and also convinced me to\u00a0make an appearance on Inside Windows Phone<\/a>. I hope it better explains what the team shipped with 8.1.\u00a0 \u2013 CRS<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018what\u2019s new in phone\u2019 discussions so far). In my honest opinion, I found the new social capabilities in 8.1 pretty amazing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I haven\u2019t 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\u2019s just so much more richness to the subject than 140 characters can do it justice. \"Smile\" 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\u2019t), but how you can get started taking advantage of them today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why social?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018why I love my phone\u2019 pitch. Using the People Hub<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n\n\n

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The\u00a0People Hub<\/a>\u00a0is 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\u2019m busy \u2013 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 \u2013 magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What can be extended?<\/h2>\n\n\n
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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\u2019s social graph.\u00a0Over 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With 8.1, there are three integration points that are opened up for app developers publishing into the Store:<\/p>\n\n\n\n