Entries Tagged 'openSocial' ↓

Google Friend Connect Is trying to catch up with Facebook Connect, and just now released its first set of APIs, which will let developers integrate Google Friend Connect more deeply into their sites and applications. Google Friend Connect offers a single sign-on service as well as several data portability features.

The new APIs will allow site owners to use both JavaScript and REST APIs to embed Google Friend Connect directly into the markup language of each site and make it easier for to combine it with their existing login systems. Google has also created APIs for developers who want to create plugins for content management systems such as Wordpress and Drupal. Gadget developers now have better authentication options as well. According to the API page:

Friend Connect API’s enable developers to

• Integrate social flows and data directly within a page’s markup, via the OpenSocial standard specification
• integrate existing login systems, registered users, and existing data with new social data and activities.
• Create social gadgets & services that are embeddable within millions of Friend Connect enabled sites.

Of course, Facebook Connect already has its own set of competing APIs (which are the same ones used by its 670,000 application developers). The Google Social Blog has more info.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

You can log in to comment here on ReadWriteWeb with an OpenID, via Facebook Connect or through various other methods. Imagine if you could make “friend” connections with other commenters on our site. That relationship wouldn’t be reflected back into the OpenID or Facebook account that you then take to other sites.

If it did, that could be a real game changer. We’d love to introduce our smart and sassy readers to each other here and then see them be friends on social networks, mobile sites and all around the web. Just a pipe dream? That’s what a brand new identity provider called Cliqset aims to make possible. We believe it’s the first identity provider of its type that allows 3rd parties to change user profile information, not just read it.

Sponsor

Cliqset isn’t a social network that you’d go and join like you would others, it’s more like the glue that ties together your identities across all supporting social networks. Unlike other similar services, though, this portable system of identity, contacts and activities works two ways. It allows your identity to be changed by what you do around the web, it doesn’t just serve up a centralized identity to dependent lesser networks you log in to. This identity provider could treat supporting sites much more as equals than Facebook does, for example.

Cliqset uses the OAuth data standard to do all this, so it doesn’t even have to ask for your password to the networks you want to connect.

Who’s using Cliqset so far? Unfortunately, the geeks behind Cliqset don’t do a very good job explaining what they do and they don’t have any examples other than their own site today at launch.

That could change soon, though. The company has released a variety of code libraries for developers to drop Cliqset support into their applications. At launch there are Java, iPhone and .net for Windows Mobile libraries. A PHP library is forthcoming. All the libraries will be open sourced and posted to Google Code.

Facebook Connect lets 3rd parties publish updates to a user’s activity stream, but that’s about it. We asked a number of hardcore identity geeks whether they had seen anything quite like Cliqset before and no one had. There are OpenID and related specifications aiming to accomplish just this, but nothing in the wild yet, according to the OpenID Foundation and Six Apart’s David Recordon.

Recordon is a little concerned about seeing another company release an API to accomplish what Cliqset aims to do. “At first glance, it seems like Cliqset is leaning in the correct direction with their support of OAuth for APIs and OpenID for sign in, but are still creating their own APIs – ala Facebook Connect – when dealing with profiles and activities,” he told us. “This is both yet another validation of the work by the wider DiSo community and opportunity to finalize the Portable Contacts and Activity Streams specifications for broad adoption on the social web.”

We asked Cliqset specifically about Facebook Connect, whether it wasn’t in the company’s interest to implement a Read/Write capability in its identity system as well. They said they believed it was but that they expected the giant social network to take much longer to implement this key feature. By offering iPhone and Windows Mobile libraries right out of the gate, we think Cliqset could move quickly in the mobile world as well.

Unfortunately, the company isn’t doing a terribly good job of explaining its fundamental value proposition so far. We’re not the first site to cover Cliqset today (see PC World’s coverage for example) and everyone else is writing up the company as just one more cross-site identity provider. There’s more than that going on here, but we’ll see if this startup with what it calls “the most robust APIs you’ll find anywhere” is able to make the market headway that its innovative vision seems to warrant.

Discuss

Yahoo! Updates, the company’s answer to Facebook Connect, became available on more than 600,000 websites today with the launch of a new partnership with commenting infrastructure company JS-Kit. Whereas Facebook’s technology for tying profiles and activity updates between sites around the web has raised concerns about proprietary control over data, Yahoo! has implemented the open standard OAuth in its system.

By partnering with JS-Kit, a service that powers comments and ratings on sites big (like AOL and Sun Microsystems) and small (JS-Kit bought up old school market leader Haloscan in July), Yahoo! Updates is coming out of the gate in a big way. How does its technology compare to Facebook Connect?

Sponsor

The vision for all these kinds of systems is that allowing readers to authenticate themselves with a trusted 3rd party makes them more likely to post comments, offers exposure to site owners when comments are syndicated into activity streams on bigger sites and should allow site owners to access verified information about their readers’ profiles and interests. That last part is still something we’re waiting for, but that should be part of the value proposition to site owners.

Facebook Connect has been lauded for its usability; so much so that advocates of OpenID felt deeply threatened until Facebook teamed up to work with them on the OpenID user experience. In contrast, the Yahoo/JS-Kit user experience is immediately quite usable and full-featured. The same type of pop-up window asks users to grant permission to JS-Kit (or any other site using Yahoo! Updates) to access their Yahoo! profile information. There are a few extra boxes users have to click in order to grant that permission, but that’s the extent of the complications. You can test the implementation on this page.

We’re quite impressed with the technology and we’re always appreciative of the way that Yahoo! supports open standards. It’s not as if the company is accepting 3rd party OpenID login on Yahoo! sites yet, but all these other little steps are quite significant.

One thing that Yahoo! doesn’t currently offer is syndication of off-site activities into Yahoo! properties. The company says that’s coming soon.

In the coming months, as Updates are implemented across Yahoo!, publishers will enjoy referral traffic back to their sites from across the Yahoo! Network (more than 500M+ monthly unique visitors)…Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Profiles, etc.

If you thought Facebook represented the mainstream face of newsfeeds, 3rd party identity authentication, etc. just imagine what Yahoo! could do. The only question is whether the giant company will move fast enough – Facebook is very close to having stolen its thunder already. Yahoo! has been talking about “opening up” and integrating social data across its sites for months, Facebook tends to be much, much faster at taking action and innovating.

Facebook Connect is also available on JS-Kit supported pages, so it’s not as if Yahoo! has surpassed Connect. We’ve asked Facebook for a precise number of pages that Connect is available on and are awaiting a reply. We do know that the company says that 6,000 developers have implemented Connect, but for all we know that number includes JS-Kit with its 600,000 sites as just one developer.

What do you think of the new JS-Kit/Yahoo! tie-in? Would you use it on sites where both it and Facebook Connect are an option? You can test Facebook Connect here on our site or both Connect and the new Yahoo! Updates commenting over on Guy Kawasaki’s blog.

Discuss

Google is now making it easier for Websites to surface Friend Connect features with what it is calling the Social Bar. This is a toolbar that Websites can add to their homepage or any other page they wish, and then they can add links for drop-down gadgets that lets site visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, or site members, all from Social Bar. Here is an example.

Basically, the social bar is a small strip that webmasters can layer on top of any web page, either at the top or at the bottom. That way, website visitors are provided with a bit of information, and the bar also lets them interact with any social feature the site incorporates through drop-down gadgets. As Software Engineer Christopher Wren explains in the announcement blog post, this is a good way to save on pixel space and keep putting the actual content of the site forward first.

Here are some of the gadgets Websites can include in the Social Bar, from Google’s brand new Social Web blog:

• On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
• Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
• The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
• Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.

The toolbar approach is both an attempt at ubiquity and invisibility at the same time. Google wants Friend Connect to be everywhere, but at the same time it doesn’t want to seem too pushy about being everywhere. Hence, the seemingly innocuous toolbar. But that toolbar expands with pop-down gadgets, which takes advantage of Google’s strengths with creating gadgets in iGoogle and elsewhere. Can a Facebook Connect toolbar be far behind?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation, something that many OpenID advocates have hoped would happen for some time. The two systems of logging in to distributed websites, OpenID and Facebook Connect, have been characterized as rivals – OpenID being the high-minded but socially awkward one who doesn’t get invited to parties despite being a really good person and Facebook Connect being the rich preppy popular kid from the 80’s movie who’s a bully but is good at sports.

Now they’ve joined forces, on some level. Cynics immediately said it would make no difference, that their cynicism remained unchanged, or that Facebook was likely to “pull a Microsoft” and try to destroy OpenID. We disagree. We think this is good news. Here is why.

Sponsor

Both systems, OpenID and Facebook Connect, claim to offer a number of benefits:

1. Both make it easier to participate in new websites because you don’t need to create a new account.
2. Both carry payloads of user data that can yield immediate personalization for a richer experience.
3. Both offer authentication that you really are who you say you are. That opens up a whole world of possibilities technically and culturally.

That’s what this is all about, here’s why we think tonight’s news is important.

1. ID Systems Should Be Integrated

Users shouldn’t have to choose between logging in someplace with an OpenID log-in or with Facebook Connect. We should be given both options wherever possible, including on Facebook. Facebook could allow users to associate another account with a Facebook account and just log in using that other account. No big deal. As OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina told me in a recent interview, user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors.

We hope that today’s announcement will be a step in that direction.

Image above: JanRain’s RPX product, as seen on over 200 Universal Music artists’ web pages.

2. OpenID’s Momentum is Incredible, Really

A lot of people complain that OpenID is moving too slowly; they see the problems with it and don’t understand why it’s taking the rest of the web to hurry up and solve those problems.

In reality, OpenID has gone from a LiveJournal technical project, to being a mailing list for freaks and dreamers to becoming a global phenomenon that huge companies are contributing their time, money and brand names in order to help develop – all in just 3 years.

In the past 18 months these companies have lined up to perform the easy part of OpenID, acting as an authentication party at other websites, and now the pressure is building for someone to break the dam and turn OpenID into a big two way phenomenon, allowing people to log in to Facebook with another OpenID, for example.

Just for context – OpenID is younger than YouTube and Facebook, neither of which have quite figured out how to monetize changing the world yet. So give OpenID a break, it’s doing really well. Getting Facebook on board the OpenID Foundation is a big win and just the latest of many recent victories.

3. The User Experience Help Will Be Invaluable

Everybody knows that the User Experience with OpenID is difficult for people unfamiliar with it, and sometimes for people who are familiar with it. Facebook is often offered as an example of how it can be done, but as a grumpy OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina put it tonight – “Facebook Connect is simple because there is no choice: you click a button. Of course, that button only works for the growing subset of the web who have Facebook accounts and want to share their Facebook identity with the web site displaying the button, but that’s why their experience trumps that of OpenID’s. If you take away user choice, everything becomes simple.”

OpenID is a complicated thing. Who better to help work on the user experience, though, than Facebook? Their designers have done a great job and everyone says that the UX will be priority #1 now that Facebook is on board. Throw enough designers at the problem, from a wide variety of companies, and there should be several good solutions at least.

It’s probably not going to be that hard to fix, either. Check out this proposed solution, for example. That’s getting closer is it not?

4. Compromises Will Be Made, Both Ways

How are standards created? Through compromise, negotiation and collaboration. The legal work is one of the hardest parts and the OpenID Foundation completed most of that a year ago, ensuring that no one is going to sue anyone else over using OpenID on a website. Things might get a little more complicated with Facebook’s entry, but this capable and now larger community should be able to figure it out.

Will the option to log in with Facebook Connect have to be included on other sites that prefer OpenID? Will OpenID have to be an option on Facebook at some level? Neither of those would be the end of the world and the benefits should far outweigh the costs.

5. Facebook is Not Entirely Evil

Readers sympathetic to open standards and critical of proprietary technology may have a picture in their minds eye of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rubbing his hands together and cackling about how the famous $1 billion offer he turned down to buy the company was not enough money. In reality, Zuckerberg is a big dork – a brilliant, lucky, too-powerful dork, but he doesn’t seem like that bad a person. There are, we’re sure, power hungry and distasteful people working in the organization – but there are lots and lots of people who are genuinely focused largely on innovation and improving the world. The OpenID Foundation assured us of that in their announcement today and that’s been our experience in dealing with Facebook as press as well. (Trust me, this author in particular generally doesn’t like almost anyone in an executive position at these huge internet companies.)

Especially among the Facebook engineers there is hope. Just like we’re very skeptical of Google’s frightening power over the world we live in but really like a lot of individual Google engineers, so too with Facebook come a lot of people who will be great to have working along side the existing OpenID community.

So, cynics, that’s why we think tonight’s announcement is good news.

Discuss

Long time innovator Marc Canter has made a proposal for a system to let users integrate all their social networks from around the web into one central dashboard. He calls it the DiSO Dashboard.

So far it’s just a vision, albeit a pretty specific one, but we expect to see something like this on the market very soon. Is it what you want? Now is a good time to share your thoughts on the subject.

Sponsor

“Distributed Social Networking” (DiSO) is what a growing number of people are calling the move to aggregate and integrate our activities, data and social connections built up on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter and our personal blogs. (See also the DiSO Project.) Much of the conversation concerns technical standards to make it possible, but once it’s technically doable – how should it look for users? Canter offers the following proposal and we think it’s a good one.

Marc Canter believes that the “dashboard” is the best metaphor to manage all this activity through. Millions of people are already familiar with this basic idea, having used My.Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Jive Software or other services like this. (We like dashboards here at ReadWriteWeb a lot and recommend checking out this post on traits of a successful dashboard for tips on setting one up for yourself.)

Your DiSO dashboard might serve as a new interface for your blog, your social networking account, or be a stand alone service itself. The parts of your dashboard that you made public would be discoverable and viewable by other people. What would it bring together for you to access all in one place? This is the meat of Canter’s proposal. (Update: Actually, Canter stopped by in comments below to clarify that it’s the outline structure of these data collected in a dashboard that’s really the meat of his proposal. He says he’s working on an editor to edit such outlines, in fact. See his comment below for clarification.)

• Your status and availability, see and change these from your dashboard.
• Widgets and gadgets for doing various things, just like people add to dashboards now.
• Your incoming subscriptions (RSS, friends’ new media published, perhaps some email).
• Your published media and content going out, manageable in the dashboard. Not just blog posts, microblogging messages and media – this could include your comments from around the web, reviews you’ve posted of products, testimonials people have written about you, music playlists – you name it.
• Access controls to all your content, determine what’s public, what’s private, what’s viewable by friends, family, co-workers or members of another group. This is a very important part of the distributed social networking vision.
• Your various accounts and identification. Think of this as a virtual wallet, though Canter makes no mention of commercial activities we can assume that payment methods like your PayPal balance or online banking updates would ideally be included in your private dashboard.
• Your “social graph” aggregated. See all your contact lists in one place, including links to the dashboards and various social networking accounts that each contact has given you permission to view. Ask from your dashboard for permission to connect with those contacts in new places.

DiSo Dashboard Outline

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: outline diso)

The idea is that the DiSO Dashboard would be a place to read, write, manage, make discoverable, connect and normalize the data for all your activities around the web. The data standards aren’t figured out yet, but major social networking vendors are meeting now to work them out.

How would it look? What would be surfaced to users at various levels of the interface? We hope that vendors make that highly customizable but default settings are something that needs to be figured out.

What do you think? Would you like a dashboard like this? What else would you like in it? Speak up now, these services could be a big part of your experience on the web soon and they are being planned and built as we speak.

Discuss

OpenSocial recently had its first year anniversary, and the specification and APIs are growing in popularity. And now, courtesy of the OpenSocial team, several new client libraries are available for leveraging server-to-server APIs. This gives developers easy access to building OpenSocial apps in languages other than JavaScript.

The new OpenSocial client libraries utilize the OpenSocial REST and RPC protocols, and they are available in four flavors. Pick your choice of Java, PHP, Python, or Ruby, and you will be on your way to developing some social applications.

According to the OpenSocial Blog:

Each library enables developers to retrieve profile information and persistent data from supporting containers without having to concern themselves with managing network connections, signing requests, or other lower-level details.

These containers are a great addition to the other resources currently available for OpenSocial. Be sure to check out our OpenSocial API profile as well as the OpenSocial Developer web site for additional information.

Share This

OpenID holds much promise as a means of supporting a single digital identity that can be used across the Internet. Currently there are several types of OpenID identity providers out there, and several of the major players on the web, including AOL, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!, have committed to become OpenID providers as well. While there is some concern about the ‘Balkanization’ of OpenID by these service providers (essentially the concern is over the fact that service providers will only provide OpenIDs and subsequently they will not become consumers of OpenIDs from other providers), the positive side of this adoption is that hundreds of millions of existing user accounts can now be used as OpenIDs.

However, there is one catch: at present implementing OpenID support for more than one of these providers can be challenging, given that the OpenID specifications and extensions supported vary among each provider. Enter RPX, a new software as a service (SaaS) that handles the user interface, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data for any web site.

RPX essentially serves as a proxy that utilizes OpenID (and several other open standards such as OAuth and HCard) to provide users on your web site with the ability to register and sign in using several different accounts, including AOL, Facebook, Google, MySpace, Yahoo!, and many other OpenID providers. Rather than trying to figure out which provider supports which specification and extension, RPX presents a unified sign in form that allows your site to become an OpenID consumer that supports accounts from the major service providers.

According to the RPX web site:

When a visitor is ready to sign in or register at your website, you display the provided RPX login interface. The sign-in interface helps the user choose their provider, and then RPX authenticates the user with their provider. The sign-in interface can be added as a popup overlay, or embedded directly into your webpage. If you’d like to build your own custom interface, that is also possible.

RPX includes an API that can be used to customize your implementation of the service, including the user interface (see our RPX API profile for details). Currently RPX is available as a freemium service. You can check out the full documentation available on the service and API. RPX was developed by JanRain, an OpenID solutions provider from Portland, Oregon.

Share This

There are way too many comment login systems out there. Each blogging platform (Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger) has its own login system, then there are the cross-platform commenting systems like Disqus and JS-KIT. But many of these will soon give way to Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect.

I am talking about just the ID people use to login, not the commenting systems themselves. We adopted Facebook Connect as a login option for anyone who wants to leave a comment on TechCrunch, and it already accounts for more than 20 percent of our comments. FB Connect is also now available to any of the 500,000 blogs and sites that use the JS-Kit commenting widget, and Disqus is planning on implementing Facebook Connect before the end of the year.

Other blogs are adopting Google’s Friend Connect (which lets people login with various email credentials, or even Twitter). JS-Kit is also working on adding Friend Connect, as well as MySpace ID as login options.

All of this choice is great, except that already there are six different login options in The JS-Kit widget (Guest, Existing JS-Kit, New JS-Kit, Haloscan, OpenID, FB Connect). Pretty soon we’ll need the equivalent of a “Share This” button, perhaps a “Universal ID” button, that will then open up to all the options. But I think that’s too much. Engineers may feel it is egalitarian, but consumers run away when they are presented with more than 3 or 4 options.

That is why I think Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect will win in the end (Sorry, MySpace). People may have IDs for the various blogging platforms or commenting systems, but most don’t identify with them. It is a necessary inconvenience. They identify with Facebook or their email because that is where they manage their personal and professional lives.

In addition to replicating the comments on your Facebook News feed, the JS-Kit implementation also supports embedding Facebook photos and YouTube videos directly into the comments. It makes commenting much more personal when you know your friends will see it in Facebook. It also has the potential to reduce the amount of comment trolling and general incivility that has taken over many blog comments (we hope).

Update: No sooner did I post this than I learned that not only is Disqus working on a Facebook Connect plugin, but so is Six Apart (for Movable Type), Wordpress, and MediaWiki. Here is an entire Facebook Connect plugin directory. Grou.ps is also adding FB Connect.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Google’s universal sign-in system, Friend Connect, which just opened to all Websites two weeks ago, now accepts Twitter IDs as a sign-in option. That means when you visit a participating Website that accepts Friend Connect as a log-in option, you can sign in using your Twitter account. If any of the people you follow on Twitter are also members of the third-party site, they will automatically be added as your friends.

Friend Connect also supports IDs from Google, Yahoo, AIM, and OpenID. For instance, I tried this on the Go2Web2.0 blog, which has implemented Friend Connect, and it gave me the option to use my Gmail or Twitter accounts (I could also use Orkut or Plaxo). I used my Twitter sign-in without a hitch. (Update: Actually, this is a little confusing, but it signs you in first using one of the four credentials above and then asks you if you want to add Twitter).

The race is on between Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, and MySpaceID to sign up the most third party sites. Adding Twitter as an issuing party is a big win for Friend Connect because sites are going to choose the sign-in system that gives their visitors the most options and broadest reach.

There is nothing stopping sites from implementing more than one sign-in system, but at some point presenting visitors with too many options becomes confusing. For instance, we use Facebook Connect, in addition to our own sign-in system. Should we add Friend Connect? Probably. MySpaceID?

It’s only been a couple weeks since these have become widely available, and already universal sign-in is anything but. Here is a list of sites that are live with Facebook Connect, and some example Friend Connect sites can be found here (if anyone has a more comprehensive list of sites live with Friend Connect, please add to comments).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.