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 500 million users worldwide, twice 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 as online socializing is no longer confined to a desktop. People can be seen using Facebook and Twitter, among other services, while on the train, in their cars, and pretty much anywhere.

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 RSS feeds from news sites, is made that much more useful when the user can tweet, post, or e-mail articles at the touch of a button. In this chapter, we will begin with the original social communication medium, e-mail, before continuing to show you how to integrate the world's largest social networking services, Facebook and Twitter, into your application.