I met with my advisor about 10 days ago as the new semester started, and we discussed adding social network aspects to the paper I’m working on for the SRII Conference. So I’ve spent some time learning the APIs for Yelp and Facebook (as a start).

The good news is that the APIs don’t seem all that complex. Well, the Yelp API isn’t that complex; I haven’t worked with the Facebook API enough to make a judgment. Complicating the fact is that I’m writing thick client Java code, and these apps are both built on the assumption that it is other web sites that will be using their applications. The practical effect is that the responses I get are JSON objects that I’ll need to parse if I want to get at the information of interest to me. Not necessarily a difficult task, just a pain.

But I am making progress, so that’s a good thing.