This is the season where a bunch of games are coming out. I personally am very excited for Ghost Recon. It’s a 3rd person shooter that is very team oriented. You really are forced to adapt to the situations that the game throws at you, which is one reason why I love it. When I play games I am very much a team play and want to work as a team and get the job done. There is nothing that is better than being right next to the objective and dominating the game. The only way that you really can do this is by working together and that’s something that Ghost Recon does quite well. I will be trying to do a game review of the game as soon as I can get my hands on it, stream it, and play through every element of it. With your help we can make a good review so make sure to stay tuned when I release that review. I’m definitely looking forward to see what UBISOFT has in store for us to play. That’s just me personally, there are many other games that are coming out in the next couple of months. Are there any that you are really interested in seeing or are definitely going to get?

As many of you know Social Media is playing a huge role in web development. That’s why today I wanted to talk more specifically about the role that social media is playing in the realm of web. Social media is taking off in the terms of web development and will only continue to grow on a daily basis.

First off lets look at the social networking site Twitter. Twitter over the years has developed a very user friendly API and it makes it so that it’s easy for developers to integrate their twitter accounts on to their website. If you go to any companies website that has a twitter account 9 times out of 10 they have a little section that is geared more specifically to their tweets and their fans tweets about them. This has shaped so many companies because it helps build their audience on the web and it helps promote their content. Another element is other social media sites are now using Twitters API and integrating it into their website like YouTube for instance. YouTube has had the sharing capability for awhile, but recently they had a plugin that was in beta. Google has been known to test new features on random users. I had the privilege of being one of these random users. Essentially what this twitter element does is it takes anything related to the video and also anything related to streaming on sites like Justin.TV/Twitch.TV and it displays it for them in an auto updating fashion. It’s through little things like this that has helped twitter grow tremendously. The ability to develop sites using the Twitter API is tremendous.

Moving on to Google+ and YouTube. Google has always been more protective of their content and their API because they don’t want to have people stealing their concepts, but in turn this kind of hurts them in the long run because it doesn’t allow for their social networking platform Google+ be shared around the web as easy. They tend to do stuff on their own accord and try to develop the best social networking experience that they can. Google is an amazing developer and they have basically anything that you can think of, but this kinda of takes it away from the fact that their trends are limiting their audience in the sense that they don’t open up their API, which limits the potential for growth. This is one reason I believe that social Networking sites like Google+ haven’t really taken off the ground running as it could have. Google+ however is trying to be integrated within YouTube. As I mentioned before I was privileged to see some of the testing that they were doing. Google was trying to replace the like and dislike functionality on YouTube with a Google+ button. This is one thing that Google does very well, they integrate their own applications very nicely in with one another. I honestly think the addition of the Google+ to YouTube is a great step because it gets rid of all the bots that and dislike videos. People will go around on YouTube at random and dislike videos for no reason. YouTube as well hasn’t really opened up their API, but now this is ran through Google so it would’t be surprising if they don’t. For developers they really could use the API to help bring more traffic to the website but it doesn’t appear to be happening any time soon.

Moving on we have Facebook. Facebook has definitely opened up their API as well and as a result has grown quite tremendously. I honestly think that Facebook needs to switch back to a design on pages to what they used to. The timeline idea was great, but it’s clunky on pages and it doesn’t really flow as well. They could rework it a little bit and make it 10 times better. This is just speaking from the general design of it. They make it very easy to integrate your website with your Facebook page through different applications. The problem I see with Facebook is more of a design issue than anything. They have a great community and they have made it so that you can share your profiles pretty easily. Facebook is definitely a prominent factor in helping web developers grow their presence on the web.

Now that we have had a look at some of the major social media platforms I think it’s appropriate to generalize. With social media we have the opportunity to share our presence on the web and it being prominent where ever you on websites. Web developers are figuring out ways to use the social media platforms to integrate it into their website. One of of the biggest things that I can think of off the top of my head is log in and commenting integration. Both of these are huge elements in web development. If you go to any major website you’ll notice that you can log in or comment on posts using popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. With a site like WordPress you can add in plugins that allow you to register on sites using the popular social media platforms as you can see on this website. Moving forward I believe that Web Development is being pushed by social media and the constant want to integrate it into sites for a bigger audience. It’s only practical if you ask me.

Social media is and will continue to become stronger and stronger on the web. It would be best if social media could really open up their APIs and make it more web developer friendly. This allows for a more enjoyable experience because then you can share content with your friends a lot easier. I would like to see social media to work together to help further the industry. Right now web development is taking off and developers have learned a lot from social media and will continue to learn more. I see web development being heavily influenced by the APIs that these social media platforms put out for developers to use. Social media already has made a huge impact it’s only going to grow more.