MySpace Developer Team News and Announcements : oAuth, OpenSocial

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.

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!

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)!