For the past few years, Facebook has been flirting with the possibility of supporting the OpenID log-in standard, which calls itself "an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity" without actually building support for it.
Now, the massive social network--once famous for its ultra-walled-garden approach to data and user experience--announced Monday that it has become an OpenID "relying party," which basically means that it's started, at last, to deploy support for the standard. Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February, even though many considered its Facebook Connect log-in standard to be a proprietary competitor.
But, Monday's announcement indicated, Facebook believes the two can work in tandem.
"We've always let our users express their real world connections," a post on the Facebook blog read. "From the beginning, Facebook users could use their college and workplace identities to establish real world networks. Now, they can use open standards to establish their identities on Facebook."
Most notably, you can now register for a Facebook account with your Gmail account, or can link an existing Facebook account with Gmail or other OpenID-participating services if they support automatic log-in.
"We've always believed that making the user experience as secure, lightweight, and intuitive as possible, which 200 million people can comfortably enjoy and understand, is one of our top priorities," the blog post read. That could be a subtle nod to the fact that OpenID, founded in 2005, has historically been a bit difficult for the non-tech-savvy to comprehend.
Facebook's blog post also said that security concerns have been an issue. In working with the OpenID community, "we shared our experience developing Facebook Connect, where we eventually came up with a design that ensures that users would know that they were providing their login credentials to Facebook, and not some unscrupulous site."
The plus side? Facebook's tests have indicated that if new users can register with an existing Web service account, like Gmail, that they are more likely to stick around.
Facebook has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation and will host an OpenID Design Summit later this month, according to a post on the social network's developer blog.
This is a bit of a surprise because Facebook has developed its own universal log-in standard, Facebook Connect, which theoretically competes with the nonprofit OpenID standard. It should be noted that Facebook has not yet announced any official plans to make the two compatible, and that just joining the board and hosting an event might not quell the criticism from open-source advocates who say Facebook is still too proprietary in its nature.
Engineer Luke Shepard will be Facebook's representative on the OpenID Foundation board, a corresponding post on the OpenID blog explained, adding that Shepard has been "a huge internal advocate for OpenID" at Facebook. The board also consists of members from Google, IBM, Microsoft, PayPal, VeriSign, and Yahoo as well as seven elected "community" members. Many of the corporate board members joined about a year ago; OpenID creator Brad Fitzpatrick is now employed by Google and has helped to build its OpenSocial developer platform standard.
"Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID's usability and reach," the post by David Recordon and Chris Messina read.
Facebook's blog post, written by engineering VP Mike Schroepfer, expressed similar goals. "It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web," Schroepfer wrote.
Facebook made a significant portion of its developer platform code open-source last summer.
Now, this is kind of neat: Facebook Connect, the sprawling social network's universal-login project, has started to come to desktop software. Namely, it's been hooked up to the Apple photo-management software iPhoto, per a post on the company developer blog.
"We are excited that sharing your photos with the people you care about has become even easier with iLife '09, Apple's new suite of applications that includes iPhoto '09," the post by Facebook platform manager Dave Morin said. "Users of iPhoto '09 can easily share and tag photos from iPhoto directly to Facebook. With help from Facebook Connect, photo tags from iPhoto '09 can be added to Facebook and generate Facebook notifications. Additionally, Mac users can update Facebook News Feed and alert friends anytime they update their websites using Apple's iWeb '09 application."
Basically, this means that if you're a Mac user running the latest edition of its iLife package, which started shipping earlier this week, you can hook up your Facebook account for easy uploading right from iPhoto. If you use the iWeb site creation tool, you can set it up to post a message to your Facebook profile (and your friends' news feeds) if you make some kind of edit. That's pretty similar to what a number of Web-based blogging services have already set up using Facebook's platform.
I haven't actually checked it out yet, so I can't provide a thumbs up or down, but the concept itself is pretty cool. Facebook rolled out its Facebook Connect product, which lets third-party sites (and now desktop apps, apparently) use Facebook usernames and passwords for user accounts, over the second half of last year. The reception, so far, has been generally positive.
What'll be really interesting is to see the further implications of Web-based login standards like Facebook Connect as they're synced up to more desktop applications. Not that you'd really want to share all your Microsoft Word edits in your news feed or anything.
These data portability announcements keep rolling on: On Monday, Google announced that its Google Friend Connect product, which plugs social-networking features into participating sites, is now compatible with Twitter.
So what does this mean? Well, if you go to a site that uses Google Friend Connect, you can opt to use your Twitter credentials to log in to it. Then, as the official Google blog explained, you can then find which of your other Twitter friends are using the same site. Also, you can send out a "tweet" announcing that you've joined up.
Twitter was one of the launch partners for the MySpace Data Availability service, now known as MySpaceID. That has yet to launch, but MySpace has used Google Friend Connect to power the standard, so this could be a sign that it's still on the way.
What's not on Twitter yet? Facebook Connect, the rival log-in product developed by the social network, which rolled out to a full launch on the same day as Google Friend Connect. Rumor has it that Facebook tried to buy Twitter in a failed $500 million deal. There's still no reason to assume Twitter won't integrate Facebook Connect, but for now, it's just Google's alternative.
The marketing push for Facebook Connect, the social network's new data-portability project, goes on. Their angle: It's really easy to install on any site or blog.
A post on Facebook's developer blog contains a video that explains the most basic way to integrate Facebook Connect. The just-under-ten-minute video is the first of several instructional pieces, Facebook engineers said.
Focusing on ease of use is particularly important as Facebook attempts to win over site owners and publishers. There are other data-portability options out there, like OpenID and the just-launched MySpaceID, and Facebook's best bet is to convince the non-social-networking world that Connect is the clean and simple option. There are, after all, loads of non-tech-savvy media properties out there. And Facebook already has an advantage--many of the alternatives just aren't that self-explanatory.
In other news, CNET's Facebook Connect integration went live this week.
As part of the Le Web conference in Paris, News Corp.'s MySpace announced that it has taken a deeper plunge into the data portability pool.
The social network has announced its support for Google Friend Connect, which launched in full last week, and is using the standard to help power a new set of tools called the MySpace Open Platform. In conjunction, MySpace has ditched the distinctly unsexy moniker of "Data Availability" in favor of the new sobriquet "MySpaceID" for its universal log-in project. The Open Platform, in addition to MySpaceID, encompasses its OpenSocial-compatible app platform and the Post To MySpace sharing feature.
Right now, with MySpaceID, members can log in to partner sites with their MySpace usernames and find which of their MySpace friends use those partner sites. In the future, it'll also synchronize feed activity much like the rival Facebook Connect and allow MySpace members to register for third-party site accounts with their MySpace URLs.
Along with Google Friend Connect, MySpaceID was built with open standards OAuth, OpenSocial, and OpenID. MySpace, as well as Google, is one of the founding partners of the OpenSocial Foundation.
MySpace also announced the first two partners for MySpaceID: European mobile giant Vodafone and personalized home page service Netvibes. It still hasn't yet rolled out log-in credentials for the original Data Availability launch partners--Twitter, eBay, and Yahoo--but product manager Max Engel says those are still in the works.
Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect both launched last week, spurring a return to the social-networking turf wars and power struggle for control of the almighty "social graph."
Facebook Connect--the service launched last spring that lets members log on to other Web sites using their Facebook profile--appears to be entering a new phase.
The New York Times, in a big-picture story Sunday about the social network's plans to extend its reach across the Web, notes that the Facebook Connect service is gearing up for expansion:
In the next few weeks, a number of prominent Web sites will weave this service into their pages, including those of the Discovery Channel and The San Francisco Chronicle, the social news site Digg, the genealogy network Geni, and the online video hub Hulu.
TechCrunch's Michael Arrington chimed in with a related post about Facebook Connect and other such services, noting that Facebook had slated Sunday as the start of "a big press push" for Facebook Connect.
Facebook Connect was launched in May as a way for members to connect their profile data and authentication credentials to external Web sites, much like services offered by rivals MySpace and Google. Members can use their Facebook identities across the Web, including profile photos, names, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. Facebook handles the authentication process and stresses that user security is a priority.
Some of the other announced Facebook Connect partners include Movable Type, Amiando, CBS.com, CNET (that's us, of course), CitySearch, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo, and Xobni.
JS-Kit, a start-up that has created an array of social-networking apps for sites to install, has raised $3.6 million in venture funding in a Series B round led by Altos Ventures. Existing investor TEF3 also contributed.
With the funding, JS-Kit plans to make more hires beyond its team of 12 engineers as well as broaden its management team--DataPortability Workgroup organizer Chris Saad has joined the company as an advisor. The company also plans to hone its business-development strategy so that it can reach the magic "profitable" milestone sooner rather than later.
"Each of these areas provides key value to all our publisher partners who can rest assured that we have the development team necessary to continue to support the products, the leadership to execute on an exciting road map, and a sustainable business model to ensure the company's success now and into the future," CEO Khris Loux wrote in an e-mail announcement.
JS-Kit's specialty isn't gimmicky widgets, but rather low-cost add-ons for Web sites, like comments and ratings, that could otherwise be built in-house for a higher tab.
One of the key concerns for any fledgling start-up is overload. Too many users trying to get at your data is one thing, but dealing with the onslaught of notifications and data pings from connecting services can be quite another.
A new start-up called Gnip is trying to solve this problem by acting as the middleman. Got a service like Twitter that's getting attacked in a thousand different directions by services trying to get at that data? Sending any new bits of information to Gnip will keep that attack coming on their end instead of yours, which will hopefully keep your service running a lot smoother, no matter how many folks are using it. ReadWriteWeb is calling it a "Grand Central Station for the social Web."
In a perfect world, services that used this system could open up their APIs a little to encompass more activity, leading to faster third-party tools that take advantage of that data. Users would also be getting faster notifications and conceivably less downtime due to overload.
Sounds great for everyone, right?
Unfortunately, all of this will not be available from the get-go. Gnip is starting out by offering a notification service only, with polling, transformation, and identification coming later. Notifications are one of the main overloaders though, especially for services like Twitter that have had to throttle the amount of times any external service can ping it for data. There are also concerns about what happens if everyone starts relying on Gnip to pipe data to third-party tools, and the tool goes down--leading to something similar to when Amazon's S3 has had blips, taking out entire businesses for hours at a time.
Gnip was founded by Eric Marcoullier, one of the co-founders of the now Yahoo-owned MyBlogLog.
Gnip bridges the data divide by offloading all the pings off your servers and onto theirs.
(Credit: Gnip)
MySpace's Data Availability logo.
MySpace is set to release on Thursday the application programming interface (API) for Data Availability, a developer project that the News Corp.-owned social network announced in early May. Through Data Availability, participating social sites can let users synchronize accounts with MySpace profiles, importing public profile data like photos, interests, and friend lists.
Data Availability's formal launch partners are Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and News Corp.'s Photobucket, but with the release of the API, any third-party site can have access to it. Authentication is handled through the OAUTH open standard, and controls have been configured so that a high level of coding expertise is not required.
"Our users spend hours updating and making changes to their profiles, uploading content, and building friend relationships," a post on the MySpace developer blog explained. "With your help that data can now be available to MySpace users no matter where they go on the Internet."
But MySpace's project isn't the only one of its kind: rival Facebook has extended its existing API to encompass data portability in the form of "Facebook Connect," and Google has a new project called Friend Connect designed to bring social credentials to otherwise non-social Web sites.
