Here is a short summary from the “How to extend Social in SharePoint 2013” session. The session was a technical introduction to the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) of the Social functions in SP2013 (all of the new functions are also available in the server side model).

With the possibilites of the new CSOM, it is easy to build rich custom end user functionality against the social functions – imagine for example a social feed integrated in to the master page and visible on all pages in your site. The three main parts of Social in SharePoint 2013 are:

User Profiles
Following
Feeds

New namespaces and classes are included in the Client Side Object Model that enables us to program against these parts of the social functions:

UserProfiles – resides in the microsoft.sharepoint.client.userprofiles namespace. The most important class is the PeopleManager. The methods in the PeopleManager that probably will be most frequently used are GetMyProperties(), GetMyPropertiesFor(), SetMyProfilePicture(). Updating user profile properties from CSOM is not possible.

Following – resides in the microsoft.sharepoint.client.social namespace. The most important class is the SocialFollowingManager. The methods in the SocialFollowingManager that probably will be most frequently used are GetFollowers(), GetFollowed(), StopFollowing(), Follow().

Feeds – resides in the microsoft.sharepoint.client.social namespace. The most important class is the SocialFeedManager. The methods in the SocialFeedManager that probably will be most frequently used are CreatePost(), DeletePost(), LikePost(), GetFeed().