MySpace Developer Team : 8bitkid

MySpaceID and the Importance of Building on an Open Stack for the Social Web

8BitKid — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:23:00 GMT

At MySpace, we recently released several critical new feature enhancements to MySpaceID, a product under the MySpace Open Platform. We delivered OpenID support, an OpenID/OAuth Hybrid experience, and support for syndicating “Friend Updates” via the emerging Activity Streams specification.

These new components to the MySpace Open Platform allow us to not only provide developers with new tools to create distributed applications that are built on top of our social platform, but also to deliver an identity solution that builds on top of the “Open Stack” to provide flexible an extensible options that embrace open standards.

OpenID aligned perfectly with MySpaceID as an authentication technology. As a social portal, we already embraced the notion of representing identity with a URL. An overwhelming number of our users have setup vanity URLs (i.e. myspace.com/pixelelated) and so we knew that OpenID would align well with our users. In addition, we wanted to make sure that we were working with the flow of the web, and we strongly believe that collaborating on open standards is critical to this mission.

As we worked on our OpenID solution for MySpaceID, we knew that we had to rollout the technology in a way that emphasized a lightweight and simple interface design and user experience. OpenID has wrongly been maligned by a stigma that the technology can’t be easy to use. Our aim was to break that label and demonstrate with our MySpaceID product that OpenID and usability aren’t conflicting terms. Luckily, there was a community ready and willing to help. The progress made at two OpenID Usability Summits helped us refine our implementation and allowed us to leverage the collective knowledge of other OP’s. This is the strength of open standards: the ability to work together to forge ahead and work together to solve a problem.

When working on the MySpaceID design, we embraced a pop-up window for login to help make the user experience even easier, and to help the integrating relying party offer a clean hand-off. We support both directed identity as well as standard URL-based discovery, and ultimately feel that by offering modular options to developers we are creating the most value for our users. In addition, by rolling out the OAuth Hybrid extension with this, we can allow our users to provision web service access to their MySpace profile, friends, content, and activities in the same step.

Beyond our new enhancements around single-sign on with OpenID, and the rollout of the Hybrid protocol, we are supporting the new Activity Streams specification. A core part of the DNA of MySpaceID is empowering the user to take their data with them. By offering API’s for sharing activities, we’re enabling our users to take their own activities and share them through aggregation and lifestreaming services. In addition, developers can provide a user with a window into their life on MySpace by incorporating the API in Dashboard-style widgets, such as our implementation with the new Yahoo! homepage. With activity sharing, we wanted to go beyond just offering the functionality and ensure that we were working with the community to implement something that could be standardized. We embraced this philosophy when collaborating on the Portable Contacts spec and worked to align it with OpenSocial, and so we were quite comfortable with this model of development.

I hope that we have shown that our choice for the technological piping which powers MySpaceID (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, OpenSocial, and Activity Streams) didn’t negatively impact the experience we could provide. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Our choice to embrace these open standards has given us a more powerful and flexible platform. We’re excited to prove that a MySpace user can visit any site that has integrated MySpaceID and go from a button click to bringing their identity with them, all while doing it in a way that has a clean user experience and puts the user in control of their privacy, security, and data. As an OpenID community, we’ve all worked to make tremendous progress over the past year, and I think we’re only beginning to realize the real potential to empower users through open standards for the social web.

OpenID, Coming to A MySpace Profile Near You

8BitKid — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Yesterday we announced our plans to support OpenID. We are excited to be embracing this standard which will allow MySpace users to have a single-sign on solution for logging into sites across the web.

OpenID is a delegated authentication mechanism that allows a user to claim their identity through a URL. MySpace users will be able to leverage their personal profile as a way to login into many of the OpenID-enabled sites across the web.

As a developer, you will be able to implement OpenID on your site so that you can allow our users to easily login to your site without them having to create yet another username and password. Additionally, implementing OpenID will also grant you access to the literally hundreds of millions of other users who have OpenID's from a variety of other identity providers.

We are excited to be taking this next step towards empowering our users to have a portable identity, and see this as a perfect complement to the existing features of Data Availability. Stay tuned as we continue to discuss how our OpenID implementation will work and what kinds of functionality this will enable for our users and its potential for developers. MySpace is committed to taking an open, standards-based approach to our Data Availability project, and our decision to offer OpenID to our users reinforces this commitment.

- Max Engel: Product Manager, Data Availability

Data Availability Offers Enhancements to Allow for Caching and Storage

8BitKid — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:59:00 GMT

Greetings developers! First off, a quick introduction. My name is Max Engel and I'm the new Product Manager for the MySpace Data Availability project. I'm excited to be part of this effort and we are committed to making Data Availability an open, standards-based approach that grants members greater control over their identity while also providing robust privacy controls. We have listened to your feedback about what you, as developers, want from Data Availability. Today, I am pleased to announce two significant enhancements to our platform.

API Caching: We are now enabling caching on all of our APIs. We have created a 24-hour caching policy for all data fetched through our REST services. While the caches only have to be refreshed at some point before the end of this interval, we certainly encourage you to check back more frequently to make sure that our members see their changes propagate from MySpace to your site in a timely manner. Please note that when a member decides to sever the ties between the sites, the data will have to be removed after the cache expires. We have some exciting new ideas about how to help you get more from our caching system. Expect more interesting developments on this front in the near future.

Storage of Member Profile Core Elements: We now are allowing you to store certain core elements of a member's profile. We understand that having portable profile data is essential to giving members greater freedom with their online identity. Additionally, we know that it would be a difficult requirement for you to have to purge essential data after the link with MySpace is broken. To deal with this, we have created granular scoping through OAuth to give the member control over what is shared, and hope that you find this a useful supplement to our caching policy. This new portable profile should be especially useful as a bootstrapping tool to help your new members create accounts.

Keep in mind that this is an iterative process. Please let us know what works, what doesn't, and most importantly, what you need. I've created a thread in our forums to give you a chance to sound off and let us know what you want. Check out our documentation to get more specifics on what these changes mean and how you can leverage the Data Availability project to start to create more compelling experiences for your members. This is just the tip of the iceberg as we work to do our part to help move the social web forward.

Cheers!

Max

Introducing the 8BitKid!

8BitKid — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:52:00 GMT

Howdy developers,

I wanted to take a brief moment to introduce myself. I’m the new product manager for Data Availability, and you all have no idea how excited I am to be at MySpace getting the chance to spend my time working towards enabling a more social web. Before this I was at Yahoo!, first on the games team helping build our community tools for developers and players. I later worked on the “Yahoo! Open Strategy” as a product manager for our application platform and OpenSocial implementation.

You’ll find me a fan of all things open. Don’t get me started on my love of OAuth, OpenID, XFN, FOAF, microformats, etc. In all honest geekery, thinking about what we can do to transform online identity by embracing a philosophy of openness literally keeps me up at night.

I'm thrilled to be diving right in and getting to work with smart, creative, and passionate people on the Data Availability project. We have some really exciting things coming down the pipes, and I think you’ll be delighted by what you see.

Cheers!

Max Engel aka 8BitKid