MySpace Developer Team : data availability

NOTABLE MUSING – OpenID, OAuth, and User Experience

Allen — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 20:53:00 GMT

I believe OpenID is turning the corner into the ‘mainstream’. More importantly, I believe the “Open Stack” is starting to blossom here at MySpace!

[Photo Credit: John McCrea]

While I’ve been intrigued with OpenID since I first saw it added to LiveJournal in 2005, I never quite knew how it would “cross-over” into the mass adoption. I was always concerned by the obvious problem I refer to as the OpenID ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ problem (a.k.a. ‘provider-or-the-consumer’). Obviously, the correct answer – strive to be both!

Let me be the first to probably say it out loud in plain English – it’s often feels easier for the businesses implementing OpenID to start by being a provider.

This is based on two things:

Companies are just evolving from the former Internet era where we had ‘My Network and your Network versus their Network’ – now we are quickly moving into the ‘Cloud’. We are seeing network walls and walled gardens begin to open
Most companies believe their brand is the strongest with the largest reach therefore it’s best to be the provider. This is perfectly ok at this stage because there will be, when it makes sense, a natural distribution of consumers, providers, and both. As OpenID becomes mainstream we will see sites use OpenID with the methods that fit their particular business needs.

OpenID and OAuth are not only evolving in code, but also in User Experience (a.k.a. ease of use). Thanks to Yahoo, Google, Plaxo, and many others (including our very own Max Engel) there was major progress on the cognitive usage patterns of using OpenID and OAuth. Yahoo hosted the OpenID/OAuth UX Summit last week at their main campus - Thank you Yahoo!

You can also watch the recap of the live blogging during the "OpenID / OAuth UX Summit"

John McCrea, the author of the live blog above, works at Plaxo, helping to pioneer “Open Stack” thru his work co-authoring the Portable Contacts specification, and co-hosts a technology show -- thesocialweb.tv.
John was also a guest journalist on TechCrunch this week.

You can read his GREAT post here

You can also watch “TheSocialWeb” TV episode about the UX Summit below

Please make sure you read the two OpenID Usability Studies from Yahoo and Google.

This week Chris Messina (also a co-host on thesocialweb.tv) was the first to notice the progress MySpace is making on our own implementation of OpenID.

As we approach the 1st Birthday of OpenSocial it’s important to reflect on all the progress and excitement I’ve seen at MySpace to make sure we provide our large platform to help not only our users, but the developer community to evolve our platform. MySpace is using it’s stable of “Open Stack” technologies including OpenSocial, OAuth, OpenID, Microformats (including XFN), XDRS, Portable Contacts to build a robust Developer Platform that extends our “social affiliation” to 3rd party sites using Data Availability.

You can see blog post David Recordon (also a co-host of thesocialweb.tv) made on September 27th, 2008 One of these isn't quite like the others... that many companies are adopting the "Open Stack". From reading's John McCrea's TechCrunch article you can also see that progress is being made between "Open Stack" participants and those building a simlary but proprietary stack.

[Image Credit: David Recordon]

The most exciting part for me is seeing several companies trying similar concepts some in agreement and some in contrast, but knowing together we are advancing the over all social web

In my personal opinion, I believe we need to work hard to make sure it continues to get easier to program the web. We have a chance to make sure there isn’t a huge switching cost in social and cloud computing. I’m constantly amazed at the level of collaboration going to advance this cause - TOGETHER!

Fixing OAuth 404 Errors with Data Availability

8BitKid — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:32:00 GMT

If you are having trouble with your Data Availability app receiving errors when trying to use OAuth, it is most likely do to how you are specifying your "External Domain" in your application details. Make sure that for your external site setting, that the information you provided in the OAuth callback schema/parameter matches the protocol and domain specified for the external domain.

For example, external domain: http://www.myspace.com must match oauth_callback=http://myspace.com/mycallback http=http and www.myspace.com=myspace.com

It is also worth mentioning that querystrings are ignored and subdomains are not used to validate.

Cheers, Max

Open and On Location: TechCrunch50 and Portable Contacts Summit

8BitKid — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:04:00 GMT

Howdy all,

Next week MySpace will be on-site for the TechCrunch50 event demoing and discussing our application platform and Data Availability project. If you are planning on attending, definitely swing by our booth to get the lowdown on OpenSocial, OpenID, OAuth, and all things developer-facing from the MySpace Max's (Newbould and Engel).

Also, we are going to be hosting the Portable Contacts Summit next Thursday at our San Francisco office. Portable Contacts is an open initiative to define a common way to securely take your address book into new sites. You can find more info on the event: http://portablecontactssummit.eventbrite.com/

To get yourself ready to start playing with the new standard, check out the hackathon that SixApart is hosting the night before: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1078491

We have a lot of exciting work underway as we continue to develop and enhance our open platforms, and we are looking forward to the chance to talk more about those efforts.

Cheers, Max

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