I understand the term used all over social networking sites is “API”,
I did some research on the web, and it seems to be a very big topic to cover.
As per my previous post, I have made a social networking site using asp.net 3.0 and C#. It’s a small prototype.
A few tables such that the record of friends and their friends and their interest is kept. There are no privacy constraint at the moment
What I would like is to, “welcome developers please download the API for free and start making applications for the social network”. Consider application extracts interests of the friends of a friends who is using the application.
From what I understand, an API is a space to host an application either provided by me or the developer.
APIs are an interface to (all or some of) the functionalities of your application. In your particular scenario you can expose Web-apis by allowing remote http calls (for example by using web services).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface#Web_APIs