(Translated by https://www.hiragana.jp/)
Webmonkey - The Web Developer’s Resource | Wired.com
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20100425082803/http://www.webmonkey.com:80/
Apr212010
File Under: Events, Social, Web Standards

Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins

Oauth logo

SAN FRANCISCO — As we predicted, Facebook is switching to an open standard to handle user authentication across its entire platform of connected websites and applications.

Facebook is ditching its proprietary Facebook Connect system, which lets people use their Facebook username and password to log in to other sites around the web. In its place, the company will implement OAuth 2.0, an open source (and soon to be IETF standard) protocol for user authentication.

Viewed along side the barrage of other major announcements unleashed by Facebook at its F8 developer conference here on Wednesday, the move may only seem like a minor data point. But it is one with the potential to make a broad and deeply significant impact on the social web.

Right now, users expect three choices for logging in to a site with an existing ID: Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID. That forces publishers to implement three separate systems — one for OpenID, one for Twitter, which uses OAuth, and one for Facebook, which uses Facebook Connect. But once OAuth 2.0 is up to speed and more sites move over to it, things get simpler for site owners.

Where there used to be three options — Facebook Connect, OAuth and OpenID — there will now only be two. And the two that are left are both open source.

There are still details involving token management, auto-registration and other bits of complex backend plumbing to be sorted out, that Wednesday’s events don’t change.

But the move towards OAuth is a step towards interoperability the social web sorely needs. Most importantly, it will be easier to build pathways connecting OAuth and OpenID, since both are fully transparent, open standards and the proprietary Facebook Connect system has been removed from the equation. The switch paves the way for further integrations between existing technologies.

Continue Reading “Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins” »

Apr212010
File Under: APIs, Events, Social

Adding Facebook ‘Like’ Buttons to Your Site Is Damn Easy

Like this? Yes, "Like" this.

I want to offer a quick look inside the technology behind Facebook’s Open Graph initiative to show how easy it is to mark up your website and let Facebook users interact with it.

This is only a part of the broad Open Graph strategy the company announced at its 2010 F8 developer conference. (Read our full coverage of the keynote).

Basically, Facebook is offering up a set of widgets — it calls them Social Plug-ins — that you can drop into any web page to make that page more “Facebooky.” There’s a Like button, a Recommendations widget that shows what other pages people’s friends are reading, an Activity Stream widget that shows a simplified version of the visitor’s personal Facebook news feed, and a Facebook Bar, a toolbar site owners can float at the bottom of the screen that serves all of these things at once.

Using the Open Graph widgets, you can incorporate some of Facebook’s key social interaction features into any page on the web.

The most important Social Plug-in, and the one we’ll no doubt see the most use of, is the Like button. Put it on your page, and if a Facebook user visits your site and clicks on it, a link to your page gets added to their activity stream. Suddenly, all of their friends can see that link, click on it and be led directly to your page. When that second person arrives, the Like button is personalized for them — it shows which of their friends have already clicked it, and when they click on it, a link to your page gets added to their stream.


Continue Reading “Adding Facebook ‘Like’ Buttons to Your Site Is Damn Easy” »

Apr212010
File Under: Browsers, Multimedia

Firefox Quarantines Video Plug-ins to Stop Browser Crashes

Mozilla has announced a new beta of Firefox 3.6.4, an incremental update which adds one significant new feature to Firefox 3.6 — Flash and other plug-ins now run in separate processes. That means if Flash crashes, it won’t cause the entire browser to crash with it.

To give the new beta a try, head on over to the Firefox downloads page. If you’ve subscribed the beta channel in the past you’ll automatically get the update, or you can force Firefox to update using the “Check for Updates” menu item. For now, the isolated processes feature is only available in the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. A Mac version will be available soon.

With the new “out of process plug-ins,” or OOPP as this feature is known, when a plug-in like Flash crashes, users will simply see a sad face where the Flash content should be. Reloading the page will restart Flash and try loading the file again.

Firefox’s new isolated processes feature is similar to what Google Chrome already does and will significantly improve Firefox’s overall stability since plug-ins can no longer bring down the whole browser.

For the beta, only the Flash, Silverlight and Java plug-ins are included, though you can try isolating others (for example, the Adobe Acrobat plug-in) by visiting the about:config settings and adding them to the list. Just be aware that there’s a reason only the primary three plugins are supported right now, adding others may cause Firefox to crash.

While Firefox 3.6.4 is just an incremental update it’s the first time Mozilla has delivered on its new strategy of pushing out features when they’re ready, rather than waiting for the next major release. You can thank Google Chrome and its constant updates for pushing Mozilla to adopt roughly the same policy.

To give the new features a try, head over to the download page and grab a copy of Firefox 3.6.4 beta. Remember, the isolated processes feature is only available in the Windows and Linux versions. A Mac version will be available soon.

See Also:

Apr212010
File Under: Multimedia, Software

Adobe Revamps Flash Player for Netbooks, P2P, Private Browsing

Adobe has released the first beta for Flash 10.1, the next major milestone for the Flash Player plugin.

Flash 10.1 is an important update not just for its enhanced speed and new features, but also for Adobe to show that there is in fact still a place for Flash on the web.

Flash’s ubiquity as the solution for web video and animations has been challenged recently; first by HTML5, which gives developers a standardized way to embed audio, video and animation without resorting to Flash, and also by Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its iPhone/iPad platform.

While we expect HTML5 to slowly but surely replace Flash for common tasks like web audio and video, the plugin still offers many features HTML5 doesn’t and Flash 10.1 builds on those strengths with several new features.

The two most interesting features for web developers are the new priority tag in the Flash HTML embed code and the peer-assisted networking features.

The priority tag is especially helpful for speeding up page load times on netbooks and mobile devices since it allows developers to lower the priority of a Flash movie. Set the priority tag to something low and your Flash movie won’t try to load until the rest of the page is already finished. That means faster page load times and no waiting around for large Flash movies before you see the surrounding content.

The peer-assisted networking builds on Flash’s existing P2P capabilities to offer peer-based streaming media — think BitTorrent in your Flash player. However, don’t look for Flash-based torrent clients, what’s more likely are browser-based VOIP apps, better chat features in Flash games, improved conferencing applications and possibly even P2P radio streaming.

Other new features available in Flash 10.1 include support for the host browser’s “private browsing” mode (Flash won’t accept cookies or other local objects when you’re in “private” mode), a new accelerometer class (don’t even think about using it for the iPhone), hardware video decoding, much better performance and more.

For full details on everything that’s new, be sure to check out the release notes.

For now Flash 10.1 is a beta release, so it’s a bit soon to start using the new features in the wild. But if you’d like to test them out, head over to the Adobe Labs download page and grab a copy (be sure to use the uninstaller to delete your existing Flash Player before you install the new version). The updated Flash for Mobile client will reportedly be arriving later in 2010.

See Also:

Apr212010
File Under: Events, Social

Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Facebook is launching a new suite of tools that bring the Facebook social experience to any site on the web.

The company is releasing a set of products called Social Plugins, which any web publishers can drop into their website using one very simple line of code. These plug-ins will let visitors “Like” news stories, photos and so on. Once a user likes something, it instantly gets added to the appropriate section of their Facebook profile.

The plug-ins are part of a new Facebook initiative to make every website on the internet sharable across its network, something the company is calling the Open Graph.

The announcements were made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and platform engineer Brett Taylor at the company’s F8 developer’s conference taking place here Wednesday.

Facebook will roll out the Like buttons Wednesday morning, and Zuckerberg boldly estimates that within 24 hours, there will be one billion Like buttons across the web.

Facebook has often been branded as the next AOL, a website that basically recreates several experiences available on the open web — chat, e-mail and link sharing — behind a closed gate. But with Wednesday’s Open Graph announcements, the company is giving website owners a bigger door into Facebook’s closed system using simple HTML tools and by incorporating open standards into its authentication system.

Zuckerberg, speaking with his trademark brand of stiff, awkward enthusiasm, calls the new Open Graph initiative “the most transformative thing we’ve ever done for the web.”

A grand platitude, certainly, but one of the most transformative shifts in Facebook’s policies, as it enables sites to more easily link up their content on the open web with the Facebook ecosystem and access its 400 million active users.

“With these tools, any web page can become a Facebook page,” Taylor says. “If you don’t like the way Facebook pages look, just make your own. Add the Like buttons and the Open Graph elements and you’ve got a page that’s fully integrated into Facebook.”

Continue Reading “Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web” »

Apr212010
File Under: Events, Location

Facebook Tags Everyone at F8 with RFID Chips

photo

Meet your friendly Facebook RFID tag.

Here at Facebook’s F8 developer’s conference, each attendee has a small plastic token attached to their badge. Inside the token is an RFID chip. On the back, there’s a ten-character unique ID code. We’ve all been instructed to go to facebook.com/presence and enter our personal code to activate it.

Once your token number is linked to your Facebook account, you can walk around to each of several readers set up around the venue here. There’s an RFID chip inside this little blue piece of plastic, and at each reader, that chip gets scanned and some sort of post goes up on your Facebook profile’s Wall.

There’s a photo booth — scan your chip and it snaps a photo of you and uploads it to your account. There are gaming lounges, and you can become a fan of whatever company or game is sponsoring that lounge by tapping your chip against the reader.

It’s possible there’s some tie-in to a larger presence-sharing announcement coming later on at the conference. Or, it could just be something born from a keg-fueled discussion by some engineers, as the Presence site on Facebook says.

Either way, as soon as it was explained to me what this little blue dongle was doing hanging off of my badge, my first thought was, “It begins…”

Apr202010
File Under: Events, Social, Web Standards

Up Next For Facebook: Expect More Open Interactions

Facebook F8

Facebook essentially copies a bunch of services that are already available on the open internet — chat, e-mail, media sharing, profiles — for its 400 million active users. But it also provides tools to help those users interact with each other while they’re outside Facebook’s walls, and there are signs the company is ready to make those tools more open and more easily integrated into other websites and applications.

The social network has already seen great success with Facebook Connect, its authentication system other websites can use to let their visitors log in using their Facebook username and password, then leave comments or share items with their Facebook friends with a single click. They can also hop around between websites and apps without creating a new account at each stop.

Facebook Connect has certainly fueled the explosive growth of social interaction across hardware and software platforms, as it helps Facebook friends notify each other of their activities on other social websites, the movies they’re renting, or the high score they just got on their favorite iPhone game.

Facebook Connect was first announced in 2008 at F8, Facebook’s developer conference. The next F8 is taking place Wednesday in San Francisco, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to announce the next phase of his company’s plans to further extend its sharing platform during his keynote address.

The Facebook Connect system isn’t entirely open — a key reason for its existence is to feed social sharing traffic back into Facebook. But it has much in common with other emerging open standards like OpenID and OAuth. Most social websites use a mix of both Facebook and non-Facebook options to handle user authentication, and Facebook Connect is not fully interoperable with competing technologies.

But several recent events point to Facebook making its own platform work better with open technologies. Last year, the company joined the OpenID Foundation and it began partially supporting the technology by allowing users to log in to Facebook using OpenID credentials. Also last year, the company hired David Recordon, one of the key architects of OpenID and OAuth, and purchased FriendFeed, a website that aggregates people’s social activities. Soon after acquiring FriendFeed, Facebook released its Tornado sharing framework under an open-source license.

Facebook wouldn’t comment on any upcoming announcements when contacted for this story. However, outside developers remain hopeful that the company will continue to grow its sharing platform by making it work in tandem with other open technologies already in place.


Continue Reading “Up Next For Facebook: Expect More Open Interactions” »

Apr162010
File Under: HTML5, Web Apps, Web Standards

Google Turns to HTML5 for Gmail’s New Drag-and-Drop Attachments

gmaildragndropGoogle continues to use HTML5 to push its web apps into the future. The latest bit of HTML5 to feel Google’s love is drag-and-drop support, which is now a standard part of Gmail. If you’re using Google Chrome 4 or Firefox 3.6, you can now simply drag a file from your desktop onto a message window and Gmail will automatically attach the file.

The new feature solves one of the most common complaints from web app users — why can’t I just drag and drop files like I do everywhere else? Well, thanks to the new APIs in HTML5, you can.

We’ve seen a few implementations of HTML5’s drag-and-drop features, including on Google’s own Wave, but Gmail, which has over 140 million users, is by far the most popular web app to embrace the new features. Part of the reason for the slow uptake of drag-and-drop support might well be some of the difficulties developers have had in supporting the feature — differences between browsers make drag-and-drop one of the most complex HTML5 features to implement.

Hopefully, with Gmail leading the way, drag-and-drop for uploading files will become more common since it is, as your less tech-savvy friends have no doubt pointed out, the way things should have been from the beginning of the web app era.

Gmail’s drag-and-drop support has skipped the usual Gmail Labs trial period and gone straight to standard feature (the feature is also already available for Google Apps for your Domain users).

To see drag-and-drop in action, just grab a file off your desktop and drag it into a Gmail compose window. The area above your message, where attachments are shown, will change to say “Drop files here.” Drop the file in the target area and it will automatically be uploaded and attached to your message.

For now, the new features are limited to Firefox 3.6 and the latest version of Chrome, but Google says it’s working on support for other browsers. However, that’s an odd thing for the company to say given that the only real way to use HTML5 drag-and-drop is if the browsers themselves have added support (again Internet Explorer 8 is left behind since it doesn’t support drag-and-drop — unless you’re running Google Chrome Frame).

Curiously, Safari 4 supports the HTML5 drag-and-drop API, but for now, the feature won’t work in Gmail if you’re using Safari.

Drag-and-drop isn’t the only new feature making its way into a Google product. The Google Docs team has also announced it will be switching from Gears to HTML5 to power its offline features. For the most part, the change won’t be noticeable since Gears was designed as placeholder hack for HTML5’s offline features, though it does mean that offline support will be disabled for a few days in May.

See Also:

Apr152010
File Under: Identity, Programming

To See How OpenID Can Work Well, Look at Stack Overflow

openid logoOpenID, the decentralized identity system that dispenses with usernames and passwords in favor of a single, portable web identity, promises to eventually change the way we login to our favorite websites.

While OpenID holds great promise, the reality today is that users sometimes don’t understand it. It’s an entirely different experience than a traditional login, so it can be confusing, and the user experience varies radically from site to site.

OpenID is, frankly, a work in progress. But, as developer Jeff Atwood recently wrote on the Stack Overflow blog, “I would rather be part of the solution than yet another brick in the wall of the problem… even if it involves a tiny bit of short-term friction.”

Atwood goes on to give an interesting developer perspective on what it’s been like to use OpenID on Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is an interesting case study since OpenID is the only way to create an account at the site (you can use Stack Overflow without creating an account, but there’s no way to sign up using a traditional username/password).

In other words Atwood and company made a big bet on OpenID and for the most part it appears to be paying off. Here’s some key points for developers that Atwood pulls from Stack Overflow’s OpenID experiences:

  • Google is by far the largest OpenID provider at 61% of all registered accounts
  • The change from “enter your OpenID URL” to “click the logo of the company that provides your identity” is a huge usability improvement (I’d disagree with this one, if anything, Chris Messina’s OpenID Connect proposal seems more like the future of the OpenID UI.).
  • Support for multiple OpenID providers is key, since it gives your users the ability to change OpenID identities whenever they want. This is important, as their current OpenID provider could disappear, locking them out of their account.
  • The OpenID protocol itself can be implemented in unusual or incomplete ways by different providers. Atwood points to specific problems in the way Gmail handles OpenIDs, which require Stack Overflow to request your e-mail address as a kind of fingerprint for your OpenID.

The Stack Overflow crew seems to be happy with its OpenID-only account system. It’s worth noting that Stack Overflow obviously attracts users with a higher-than-average tech savviness, but the lessons Atwood details are relevant even if OpenID is only one of your site’s many sign-in methods.

See Also:

Apr152010
File Under: Web Apps, Web Services

Twitter Plans to Launch its Own URL Shortener

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Twitter has announced it will start its own URL shortening service for tweets from its official apps.

Twitter CEO Evan Williams made the announcement Wednesday night at Chirp, the Twitter developer’s conference. It happened casually, during a Q&A session with attendees.

Williams sees the lack of an official Twitter link shortening service as “a problem” that needs to be solved.

When Twitter turns on its URL shortener, it will be the default shortener for the Twitter website, and the official Twitter apps on BlackBerry, the iPhone and Android — yes, there is an Android app in the works, Williams confirmed. The BlackBerry app is finished, and the iPhone app will be released as soon as Twitter completes the acquisition of AteBits it began last week. AteBits makes the super-popular Tweetie for the iPhone, which will be rebranded as Twitter for iPhone.

Twitter must have been planning this for a while, because it purchased Twee.tt (that’s a URL from Trinidad and Tobago) a few days ago, and that will probably become Twitter’s short URL root.

Right now, the Twitter website uses bit.ly to serve short links, and the most popular client apps give people a choice between bit.ly and other sites like tinyURL or J.mp. But bit.ly is the most popular, mostly because it’s the default link shortener for Twitter.

Williams said that the official client apps that are on their way will probably not give people a choice between different shorteners. “If they want to use a different shortener, they can just use a different app.”

The official apps will also serve Promoted Tweets from Twitter’s ad platform.

Bit.ly will likely survive — people are loyal to it now because it offers real-time stats for traffic and retweets on your shortened links. Bit.ly also has a paid service and a platform for creating your own URL shorteners.

See also:

« OLDER POSTS