Identity War
Gigya: Facebook dominates third-party logins for all but news. News is where Twitter rules; http://j.mp/9HGifF
Tagged: Facebook Connect RSS
Gerrit Eicker
Flickr Integrates Facebook
Flickr has finally integrated Facebook: connect and share (public) photos and videos; http://j.mp/cVzzbY
Gerrit Eicker
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Open Graph
The Open Graph protocol enables the integration of web pages into the social graph across Facebook; http://j.mp/bIBGzE
Gerrit Eicker
XAuth
Google, Yahoo, MySpace, others launch XAuth: open platform for extending authenticated user services; http://j.mp/9ipf3K
-
Gerrit Eicker
XAuth: “XAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web. – Participating services generate a browser token for each of their users. Publishers can then recognize when site visitors are logged in to those online services and present them with meaningful, relevant options. – Users can choose to authenticate directly from the publisher site and use the service to share, interact with friends, or participate in the site’s community. The XAuth Token can be anything, so services have the flexibility to define whatever level of access they choose. … For site publishers, the multiple HTTP requests necessary to recognize every potential online service are slow and inefficient. XAuth provides a central domain (xauth.org) with a lightweight JavaScript library that can be accessed via a single HTTP request. – Users are often presented with many social services when browsing a site. They likely only are interested in one or two. XAuth allows the user experience to be immediately relevant, so that they can easily access the services that are useful to them. – Service providers participating in XAuth can reach their existing userbase anywhere on the web without being buried in the deluge of other social services that may be available and competing for space on the publisher site. – The service providers have complete control over the features they enable for the publisher site. The XAuth Token could be a single bit denoting the existence of an authenticated user, or it could be a session ID that passes public profile info via API calls from the publisher. – Users can decide which services pass data to sites through XAuth. To view and modify any currently enabled browser XAuth tokens, go to xauth.org.”
RWW: “The gist here is that XAuth will make it easier for sites around the web to find out what social networks you are using, let you log in to those easily, access your permitted information from those networks in order to better personalize your experience on their site and easily share their content back into your social network. It’s like Facebook Connect, but for every other social network. Any website can register as an identity provider with XAuth, too. … Facebook is not participating in XAuth, though the companies behind it say they hope it will soon. That seems unlikely. For Facebook, sharing and identity start and end with Facebook. The giant social network spreads its Connect system around the web with an imperial vision. It might participate in XAuth later, as might Twitter (who calls another authentication system XAuth and generally communicates poorly with other companies), but only because they want to be everywhere. … I hope that XAuth today and browser-based identity management in the future can help other social networks gain more traction. This may be a part of the solution. It’s a nice move, but we’ll see how effective it is.”
TC: “When it comes to exploring XAuth’s potential, personalized sharing buttons are just the beginning – services can include whatever information they want in their token. Say MySpace decided it wanted to allow Meebo to automatically have access to its users’ friend lists. MySpace could include a session ID as part of its token that would grant Meebo access to that data, without any input required from the user. Using XAuth, MySpace could grant access to this token only to a select few partners on a whitelist, or it could open it up to any third parties who wanted it. – In effect, XAuth’s flexibility allows any social service provider to achieve the ‘auto-connect‘ functionality that we hear Facebook plans to launch soon. That could be powerful, but it also has the potential to be creepy – do users really want their information pre-populated as they browse the web? The answer isn’t clear yet. – That said, most sites (particularly sites where security is a priority) will probably only use XAuth to inform third parties that the user has an account with them, without actually sharing any of their personally identifiable data (in other words, we’ll see the personalized button scenario discussed above).”
VB: “Meebo’s XAuth could turn social sharing into a big business… Supporting the XAuth standard fits well into Google’s strategy of pushing open Web standards. But it also could help Google slow the growth of Twitter and Facebook, both of which are pursuing separate strategies to make their social sharing services integral parts of other websites. By making it easier to include second-tier sharing services – a category that includes the controversial and underperforming Google Buzz – XAuth could make Twitter and Facebook just two easily replaced sharing options, rather than services hardcoded into websites. … The challenge with XAuth: privacy. Even though it’s fairly easy to discover that a given person belongs to, say, Facebook or LinkedIn with a simple Web search, there’s something creepy about a third-party site knowing all the services you belong to. There’s the potential for a backlash similar to the one Google faced with Buzz, which turned Gmail users’ private contacts into a public social network. Google had to rapidly change course and make much of the information it exposed about its users private again.”
Gerrit Eicker
iTunes Integrating Facebook Connect?
Is Apple finally integrating Facebook Connect to iTunes? Has Facebook won the identity war? http://j.mp/bftPYC
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter @anywhere
Twitter: We have developed a set of frameworks for adding Twitter anywhere on the web: @anywhere; http://j.mp/cGqWps
-
Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “Soon, sites many of us visit every day will be able to recreate these open, engaging interactions providing a new layer of value for visitors without sending them to Twitter.com. Our open technology platform is well known and Twitter APIs are already widely implemented but this is a different approach because we’ve created something incredibly simple. Rather than implementing APIs, site owners need only drop in a few lines of javascript. This new set of frameworks is called @anywhere.”
NYT: “On Monday at the South by Southwest interactive conference here, Evan Williams, the chief executive of Twitter, announced that the company planned to introduce a service called @anywhere. It will allow people to make use of Twitter through other Web sites, similar to the way the Facebook Connect service lets Facebook users take their social network with them elsewhere on the Web.”
TC: “The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing. The details on the new platform are still scant, but this is Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, which we reported on back in January.”
RWW: “While many pundits expected Twitter to announce its ad platform or make an announcement about how the company plans to monetize the service (besides its partnerships with search companies like Google and Microsoft), Twitter did not offer any major insights into its plans today. When asked about the company’s plans, Williams noted that Twitter is not going to go after ‘low-hanging fruit’ and is more interested in creating a sustainable platform.”
Guardian: “Is this Twitter fighting with Facebook, Google and others for the universal login? And what is the point of a universal login if everybody thinks their service is it? Will being more integrated into other websites bring more users Twitter’s way? – Will this allow Twitter to make money? There doesn’t seem to be any indication that money is likely to change hands here. But the service is clearly being aimed at publishing sites and media companies who, one might expect, could be a revenue source in the future (even if not all of them are swimming in pools of cash right now).”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Goes Jabber
Facebook Chat goes Jabber (XMPP), adds support for Facebook Connect; http://j.mp/bJeCq7
Gerrit Eicker
-
Gerrit Eicker
Yahoo: “We have good news to share with everyone who uses Yahoo! and Facebook – in the first half of 2010 we will open the door between two of the Internet’s largest online communities. You will be able to see your Facebook friends’ activities on Yahoo! and share Yahoo! content – ratings, photos, article comments, and more – directly on your Facebook stream. We’re doing this by deeply integrating a service called Facebook Connect across Yahoo! properties worldwide, which we announced today.”
Google: “Today, we’re bringing Twitter and Friend Connect even closer together. Now you can join one of over nine million Google Friend Connect sites using your Twitter login. Once signed in, your Twitter profile will be automatically linked and you can tweet your new site membership, share discussions from the comments gadget, and invite your friends via Twitter.”
VB: “What’s interesting is the timing of Google’s announcement. It comes on the same day Facebook announced a massive integration with Yahoo’s properties, handing the social network an additional way to reach 500 million people. A big win. Yahoo users can use their Facebook log-ins to see what friends are doing on its properties and share that activity with their social network. – Google, however, doesn’t really have a large sharing platform. It has Orkut and Google Reader, but those haven’t found the same traction as Twitter or Facebook have with audiences closing in on half a billion users. It also wants to prevent the growth of closed or unfriendly ecosystems. So it’s turning to Twitter in a reactive move against its emerging competitor Facebook.”
TC: “So will Twitter integration help Friend Connect spread the way Facebook Connect is? Probably not since Twitter has nowhere near the 350 million users that Facebook does, but this is a nice addition that certainly can’t hurt. We’ve been saying for months that Twitter should have its own ‘Connect’ platform, which is sort of does in some ways, but this takes it a lot closer.”
RWW: “Identity is a very important matter online, particularly as everything becomes more social. Online identity is your address book, it’s your wallet, it’s your reputation and it could become a lot more. … Facebook and Twitter are becoming big Identity providers. Google and Yahoo! have wanted to be leading Identity providers themselves but today cried Uncle with a big nod to the supremacy of the two leading social networks. … Those small players, people working on things like OpenID, ActivityStreams, the distributed social graph and other components of distributed, independent and interoperable social networking – those players may have been sold down the river by today’s deals between Yahoo and Google and Facebook and Twitter. … The short-term trade of giving more control to two big social networks, in exchange for traffic and ad money, may not serve anyone well in the long run.“
Gerrit Eicker
Google Friend Connect
Personalize your website experience: Google Friend Connect personalises newsletters, content, ads; http://j.mp/2KJseF
-
Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Visitors to your site can get to know each other better by sharing details about themselves that are relevant to the site they’re on. As a site owner, you can help them do this by visiting the new ‘Interests’ section of your Friend Connect account, where you can add site-relevant questions that people can answer when joining your website or via the poll gadget. … We’ve also added the ability for people to send private messages to each other. … And as with any data you collect on Friend Connect, you can use open export tools and APIs to integrate this information with any other systems you might use. … The ice-breaking isn’t limited to your visitors; you’ll learn more about them too. The interests people share make it possible for you to create a more personalized experience on your website in a number of ways: send custom newsletters … personalized content gadget … Google ads”
TC: “There are actually a number of new or tweaked features in Friend Connect, but the overall gist of the changes is that they will allow site owners to offer a more personalized social experience to their visitors, while making it easier for visitors to connect with each other. … But from a social perspective, this is really about using all of this data to build out Google’s social layer. With it, Google can do things like build different social profiles for you on different sites (depending on that site’s content). The goal with that is to encourage users to interact more – you know, like on a social network, like the one that has the rival connect product and 300 million users. … So will this shift mindshare away from Facebook Connect and towards Friend Connect as the important social layer for the web? Not if Facebook has its way with the new Open Graph API in the works. Still, Friend Connect is no slouch. In the 10 months since it officially launched, there are now 9 million sites with it implemented in some way.”
RWW: “As Mussie Shore, Google’s product manager for the Friend Connect project, told us yesterday, Google wants to make it easier for site owners to engage their community. Friend Connect, which launched in December 2008, is currently in use on over 9 million sites. 2 new users join a GFC-enabled site every second. According to Shore, small communities with between 1,000 and 5,000 members represent the sweet spot for Friend Connect.”
NW: “In totality, Google is launching a number of small upgrades that in aggregate add a much greater depth to Friend Connect. The service is already massively popular, and these upgrades will only add to the draw of the service. If you have not already, get ready to be a user on Friend Connect quickly. – Friend Connect seems to be the anti-Facebook. Instead of doing all the aggregation from external points to one central dumping point, Friend Connect wants to keep your presences separate, based on niche content. I have a suspicion that both have a space, and a future online.“
Facebook: “The Open Graph protocol enables you to integrate your web pages into the social graph. It is currently designed for web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants. Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed. … You can also add any of a number of social plugins to your site with a line of HTML.”
Facebook Developer Blog: “We’re hosting our third f8 conference in San Francisco today. There are two important themes behind everything we’re delivering today. First, the Web is moving to a model based on the connections between people and all the things they care about. Second, this connections-based Web is well on its way to being built and providing value to both users and developers – the underlying graph of connections just needs to be mapped in a way that makes it easy to use and interoperable. – Today we are introducing three new components of Facebook Platform to make the connections-based Web more real: social plugins, the Open Graph protocol, and the Graph API.”
TC: “With Open Graph, Facebook Sets Out To Make The Entire Web Its Tributary System. … Basically, the Open Graph API is a way for Facebook to allow other companies, sites, services, etc to interact with Facebook without having to create a dedicated Facebook Page. Big deal, you might think – isn’t that what Connect is? Yes, to an extent, but it would seem that the idea here is to go way past that. – With the Open Graph API, Facebook wants to allow anyone to take their own site and essentially wrap it in a Facebook blanket. This doesn’t necessarily mean in a visual way, but rather that these sites which use the APIs will be able to replicate many of the core Facebook functionality on their own sites. … The idea is to keep expanding Facebook’s social graph, and more importantly, it’s social reach. … (Facebook) Connect doesn’t go far enough. If Facebook truly wants to be the main hub of social data on the web, it needs more data coming in from more sites, and Open Graph can provide that. … As Yammer founder David Sacks tweeted tonight, ‘Now that Facebook is willing to share user emails, Facebook Connect will become default signup for most websites.‘”
TNW: “Ignore Facebook Open Graph at your peril – this is Web 3.0. … The importance of Facebook’s Open Graph announcement cannot be overstated. … There’s only one fly in the ointment: Facebook itself. That name ‘Open Graph’ is a bit of a misnomer. With Facebook at its heart it’s not truly open and that could be its downfall. Open Graph is Facebook’s baby and Mark Zuckerberg and friends are ultimately in control of how it is used. … A new age is dawning, welcome to Web 3.0.”
eMarketer: “The open graph will attempt to make the Web more social. The intent is to bring together social actions from all over the Web and allow for a rich depiction (and semantic memory) of what people are liking, reading, reviewing and rating. Using the examples of Yelp and Pandora, each of which are businesses with vast quantities of information about what people like and don’t like in the realms of local businesses and music, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the Open Graph would make the Web a richer, more connected experience. … Overall, the success of Facebook’s plans depends directly on Web firms’ willingness to add the social features announced today – along with consumers’ willingness to click a ‘Like’ button frequently, or ignore it. Judging from the number of press releases I’ve received today about ‘Like’ from Facebook’s business partners, I’d say that at the very least, brands are fairly excited to see what happens.”