Introduction

Once thought to be the domain of the geeky GEN-Y, social media has grown exponentially over the past few years into the hottest area of the web. Facebook now has over 1.2 billion users worldwide, many times more than the population of the United States! Twitter was once the place where you'd hear about what someone had just eaten for breakfast; now it's the first place many people go to for breaking news.

The rise of smartphones and mobile applications has hastened the growth of these social networking services; online socializing is no longer confined to the desktop. People can be seen using Facebook and Twitter, among other services, whilst on the train, in their cars, and pretty much anywhere else too.

It's because these services are so ubiquitous that many people now expect them to be a standard service from within an application. A simple app, such as one that lists news, is made that much more useful when the user can tweet, post, or e-mail articles at the...