MySpace Developer Team News and Announcements : oAuth

Simplified off-site login with Myspace ID

Chris Cole — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 19:52:00 GMT

We're always moving to bring more value and improve the experience of working with the Myspace Developer Platform to you, our developers. As we've upgraded our APIs to support OAuth 2.0 we've also been looking at the experience of developing experiences that leverage the Myspace platform outside the walls of Myspace.

The current off-site login tools, collectively known as Myspace ID, are just too complicated and have too many similar options. Currently we support two different off-site login mechanisms through MySpace ID and our MySpace ID SDKs:

OAuth Login
OpenID Login

As we roll out our OAuth 2.0 support, that's going to add a third login option - OAuth 2.0 client login. Time and again our developers have shown us that what they want is to validate users in order to leverage their social graph data through our rich API catalog. The best solution to this problem is OAuth Login. In order to focus on delivering the best experience to our developers, we're going to phase out support for OpenID login from Myspace ID so we can focus solely on OAuth login solutions moving forward.

OpenID support will continue to function for a time period in order to allow our developers time to transition to using OAuth login. If you are currently using one of the Myspace ID SDKs, this should be a relatively simple matter; the SDKs currently include support for both OAuth login and OpenID login. In the coming months we will be removing OpenID support from the SDKs in order to eliminate confusion and retiring OpenID support.

In the mean time, you are encouraged to explore and transition to OAuth login, enjoy the simpler implementation, cleaner interface, and mobile device support. Happy coding!

Legacy REST API Updates to OAuth and Permissions

Tosh — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 22:43:00 GMT

Hello.
We just wanted to give the development community a heads-up on two changes to our legacy REST APIs we will be making to the platform in the coming weeks. Neither will require any changes on your part. The goal of the changes is to make sure developers have a consistent experience accessing the legacy (v1/v2) REST endpoints with the current OpenSocial 1.0 APIs.

The first change we are making is to reuse the code to compute and validate OAuth digital signatures that exists in the OpenSocial 1.0 APIs, in the legacy v1/v2 REST endpoints. OAuth signed requests should work consistently regardless of what endpoint you are requesting.

The second change is related to privacy bugs in the legacy endpoints. The legacy endpoints will now perform the same permissions checks as the OpenSocial 1.0 APIs. For example, profile requests in v1/v2 will check the same user permissions that the OpenSocial person endpoint does. You should expect the legacy endpoints to work the same as the current OpenSocial 1.0 endpoints, but we highly encourage you to code to the OpenSocial 1.0 endpoints and consider the legacy REST APIs deprecated.

Again, developers should not have to make any changes to continue using the Myspace Developer Platform, but we just wanted to let you know what’s coming. As always, please let us know if anything seems incorrect or needs improving. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks,

Tosh
Dev Manager
Myspace Developer Platform

MySpace Developer Analytics API Launched

Owyn — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:40:00 GMT

Hey folks,

I'm happy to say that we've published our Developer Analytics APIs for general consumption. This set of APIs allows you as developers to ingest statistical data about your application to help you better understand how your application is performing in the MySpace ecosystem.

This new API provides information about all sorts of data points, including key metrics such as impressions, installs and notification clicks. You'll also get access to valuable demographic information, being able to get data segmented by user information such as age range, gender, and geo-location, among other things.

We've also built out a little sample application to give examples of how to properly format a REST request, and how to effectively transform the output to various Google charts for charting the data. The application transforms the data into annotated line graphs, spark graphs bar graphs, pie charts and geo maps.

We're glad that we can begin providing developers with direct access to the information they need to ensure their game or application performs well on our platform!

To get started, check out the documentation, found at: http://wiki.developer.myspace.com/index.php?title=Category:Developer_Analytics

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.

A Big Week for OpenID

8BitKid — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:37:00 GMT

Today, Google announced a single sign-on solution that is powered by OpenID. This is certainly a fantastic bit of news, and comes on the heels of Microsoft's announcement of their intention to support the standard. In addition, Chris Messina wrote an excellent post yesterday on how we can overcome the usability problems that have marred OpenID to help the spec succeed, and how e-mail address support is critical to the success of the standard.

I completely agree on the importance of enabling e-mails as a valid OpenID, and believe that we should ultimately empower the user to enable the identifier he or she most strongly identifies with. At MySpace, we are uniquely positioned to work with OpenID because we have a user-base that already thinks of themselves as being represented by a URL. If you ask any MySpace user what their vanity URL is, there is a very good chance they'll know it. However, beyond us and the blogging community, most users from major OP's don't know what their URL is, even if many of them actually already possess an OpenID. That is why, even with the excitement around Microsoft becoming an OP, a user with a valid OpenID doesn't equal a user leveraging their OpenID. It is this disconnect that e-mail-based OpenID can help to alleviate. Further, we need to be flexible enough to include other identifiers that might emerge, such as cell phone numbers.

It is this eventual freedom to use the identifier you identify with as your OpenID that necessitates that the foundation take a more proactive role in marketing. It is only once the brand has been strengthened that users will understand that their URL, e-mail, or type foo identifier is something special. people know they have a credit card number, and they know who gives it to them, even if they aren't being expressly asked for their "Visa" or "Mastercard". we need that type of recognition.

With today's announcement by Google, while I am excited to see them get behind OpenID, I am troubled by some of the implications. As I indicated earlier, I am completely in favor of allowing e-mail addresses to be valid OpenID's. My concern is over the user-experience that Google is promoting for the product. The user interface they are promoting not only omits OpenID, but also is pushing e-mail address as the only identifier. While this is certainly elegant, it could potentially hurt the OpenID community by fracturing the identity provider space. E-mail-based OpenID's are great for the major mail providers, but clearly it doesn't help URL-based identity providers. I worry that this will create a rift, and also possibly make URL-based identity providers second-class citizens. As I've said before, if RP's think this is the ideal model, then, to riff on "Animal Farm", we have created a world where all OpenID's are equal, but some OpenID's are more equal then others.

This is again why it is critical that OpenID become a stronger brand, so that we can help move away from these problems. Clearly Google is doing what is best for their users; there is no question that they are proposing an elegant model. However, I do worry that if a majority of RP's decide to implement Google's recommended user experience, that those of us with URL-based identities will be left behind.

This is certainly shaping up to be an exciting couple of weeks, and am hoping that all of us, as a community, can come together to solve these fundamental problems of usability so that our users can be as excited about this technology as we all are.

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

NOW HIRING - MySpace Developer Platform Team

Allen — Mon, 19 May 2008 16:40:00 GMT

MySpace is expanding its Developer Platform Team!

Are you are knowledgeable in:

- AJAX
- C/C++
- Cross-Browser Support
- CSS 1.0 - 2.1
- DOM Levels 0 - 2
- HTML & XHTML
- Java
- JavaScript 1.0 - 1.5
- oAuth
- Object-Oriented Programming Concept
- .NET/C# 1.1 - 3.5
- REST
- WCF

Do you work in the Seattle, San Francisco, or the Los Angeles area (or want to)?

If so, we would like to talk with you!!!

MySpace recently launched the MySpace Developer Platform. We now have over 1200 live applications and growing everyday. We are hiring developers to help us expand our available APIs, evolve the MySpace Container, contributing & iterating to the OpenSocial Spec and libraries – among many other MDP related initiatives.

If you have a resume or questions, please email joe.darretta@fox.com. Please make sure you put "MDP" in the subject line (you don't have too, but it helps us)!