Singly seeks to simplify social media integration in mobile apps

Social media integration is quickly becoming a critical part of the app experience as Facebook and Twitter increase their presence on mobile devices. According to a research study published by Nielsen and NM Incite last month, the use of social media mobile apps grew 63 percent in 2012 compared to the same period the previous year. However, having to manually write the code that will authenticate users via third-party services, sync friend and profile data and share it with those services can be a time-consuming task.

In December, San Francisco-based startup Singly released a SDK into open beta that promises to accelerate this process in a matter of hours. The company refers to its services as "app fabric" for developers or, calling to mind Amazon's entry into cloud computing, "AWS (Amazon Web Services) for user data connectivity." Jason Cavnar, previously of social reader startup Nsyght, explained that Singly began as an open source initiative called the Locker Project, which archived tweets, photos and other social media activities into a private online space. "As we just dealt with the complexities of accessing the data, it became obvious that, more than an end user product, what was needed was a service for developers," he said. Feature