MySpace Developer Team : myspaceid

Digsby gets an upgrade and adds MySpaceID

Brandon Black — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 05:43:00 GMT

We’re excited to let everyone know that our friends over at Digsby just released a new version of their feature-rich, but incredibly lightweight all-purpose chat client yesterday which now includes an incredibly note-worthy implementation of MySpaceID.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Digsby is a desktop application that allows you to simultaneously use all your favorite IM clients (AIM, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, MSN, Jabber, ICQ) and keep track of your email inbox all in once place. Digsby also provides some very handy integration with all your favorite social networks where you can keep track of what all of your friends are doing and receive notifications straight to your desktop. Additionally, through the use of your Digsby.com account, Digsby allows you to organize your friend lists and take all your settings and preferences with you to any computer you are using.

Digsby's newest release includes a ton of useful new features, here are just a few of them:

MySpaceID and Activity Stream - Powered by the MySpaceID APIs and open standards including OpenID and OAuth, you can now view your entire activity stream, update your status, receive messages and notifications from MySpace, and much more straight to your desktop using Digsby. The seamless integration between Digsby and MySpace allows you to do much of what you can do on MySpace's website, including browsing photos straight from the activity stream. This is a great example of how any developer can add incredibly rich social networking features to their application quickly and easily using MySpaceID.

Global Status - A new status update dialog that allows you to set your status across all your social networks and Twitter in addition to all your instant messaging networks. This new dialog for setting your global status includes spell checking and the ability to easily share links and photos with others directly from your status.

Digs.by (URL Shortening) - Along side the new global status update dialog that was introduced with this latest release, Digsby is adding a URL shortening service specifically for Digsby users. This new URL shortening service will serve all links from http://digs.by and in the future the team at Digsby plans to provide history, tracking, and statistical information to this URL shortening service.

Great work by the Digsby development team! We can't wait to see what cool features they come up with next.

What is MySpaceID? Watch a video explaining it here.
To learn more about integrating MySpaceID into your website or application, click here.
To learn more about Digsby, please visit http://www.digsby.com
To download the latest version of Digsby, please click here.

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.

New Features for MySpaceID Live!

Donny Mack (DM) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:24:00 GMT

Greetings Developers!

Today the MySpace Open Platform team launched new functionality for MySpaceID and a remarkably useful set of MySpace ID SDKs. Other key updates in the release include fixes for Custom parameters on the callback function. Additionally, today MySpace announced the limited testing of a MySpaceID implementation on the Yahoo! homepage.

New MySpaceID Features:

Activity Stream from Web sites using MySpaceID
MySpace Members' activities on MySpaceID-enabled Web sites can now be streamed to any site on the Web -- increasing engagement on partner sites. Partner sites can filter MySpace Members' activities by the activity feed type: photos, events, music, etc. For example, a photo-sharing site could choose to display activities specific to photo uploading, photo tagging, and photo album creation. We are currently Beta testing, but will have this API available to everyone soon.

Easy authentication using OAuth and OpenID
Integration of both OAuth and OpenID into MySpaceID enables MySpace Members to securely login to MySpaceID-enabled Web sites using their MySpace credentials. The combination of OAuth and OpenID allows MySpace Members to bring their MySpace identity with them, solving the problem of username and password fatigue.

New Application Developer Workflow
The modified MySpace Developer Workflow ("Create App") streamlines the process of building and configuring an application. Especially notable is its dedicated path for MySpaceID application development, which provides developers with “key” data needed to implement secure OAuth access tokens.

To begin, click the Build button in the blue navigation bar.

MySpaceID SDKs - Developer toolkits demonstrate the "Open Stack" approach
MySpace introduces the Beta release of its MySpaceID SDKs for MySpace Open Platform Developers. Developers have been clamoring for toolkits and code examples for months, and they will undoubtedly be very excited about this SDK release, which is based on completely open Web standards. The client libraries are initially being released in PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET and Java, with additional libraries planned in the future for Cocoa and Android.

See the MySpaceID SDK page for an introduction and links to all SDK resources and documentation.

See the MySpaceID documentation for more information.

MySpaceID on the Yahoo! Homepage
The MySpace application is one of several new apps that Yahoo! recently began testing as part of its new Yahoo! homepage. The application enables users to check-in and keep up to date with the information and people they care about most. The launch marks a significant milestone for MySpaceID.

“The MySpace App, currently in testing on the new Yahoo! homepage, adds new social functionality into the Yahoo! experience by using MySpaceID to connect Yahoo! users to their MySpace network,” said Jason Oberfest, general manager of the MySpace Open Platform. "By logging into MySpace from the new App right on the Yahoo! homepage, users get quick access to their MySpace friend updates, friend requests, and can manage their MySpace status, mood and more – all while catching up on their other activities on Yahoo!” he explains. “By working with Yahoo! we have been able to take a big step forward in evolving the open Web. We are very pleased to be working with them.”

The new Yahoo! homepage is currently being tested by a small percentage of Yahoo! users in advance of a public beta. More information is available at: http://ycorpblog.com/2009/02/13/update-on-our-new-homepage-testing/.

With these enhancements, MySpace is the first major social network to have the full "Open Stack" implemented where information is flowing to partner Web sites based on completely open Web standards. MySpace now offers full OpenID support on every custom user URL.

MySpace is also the first major party to implement the new activity stream open specification.

Using JanRain's RPX to Leverage MySpaceID

8BitKid — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 23:13:00 GMT

Greetings developers!

JanRain offers a service to help sites easily get going with portable identity solutions by handling the "UI, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data for your website." It is a great complement to MySpaceID, by offering compatiblity with our identity platform. As a developer, this can help you easily get going with our platform while letting JanRain handle much of the heavy lifting with their excellent product offering.

We're excited to be integrated into the product as of last week, and have been collaborating to help provide the developer community with a better experience.

You can learn more about the product and get going with it here. You can also read about their recent release here.

Again, we're thrilled to be able to offer a variety of ways for developers to best get going with our platform, and congratulations to the JanRain team for creating a compelling and easy-to-use product.

Cheers, Max