Facebook Comments Box
Facebook improves its Comments Box: platform, social relevance, moderation, distribution; http://eicker.at/FacebookCommentsBox
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
XAuth
Google, Yahoo, MySpace, others launch XAuth: open platform for extending authenticated user services; http://j.mp/9ipf3K
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.”