14 DAY TRIAL // Online identity is one of the biggest themes on the web today and a number of providers, most notably Facebook and Google, are battling it out to become the most powerful player in the field. On the other hand, there is a great tendency towards integration and interoperability between various web services. One increasingly popular way of enabling this is OAuth, a protocol which allows sites to share private data in a secure manner. The next generation OAuth WRAP specification is getting fleshed out and this time around it gets the full support of Facebook which has now introduced an experimental implementation on FriendFeed, which it acquired last summer.
"While Facebook Connect and our APIs do not use OAuth today, we've been working over the past month to share what we've learned with the broader community and shape both the new OAuth WRAP specification and OAuth's IETF standardization effort," Facebook's David Recordon writes.
This move is interesting from two perspectives. For one, it makes a definite commitment from Facebook to the standard. The social network has had great success with Connect which serves a very similar purpose to OAuth's albeit with a more limited scope as it is restricted to Facebook data, but it plans to support the open standard as it moves on. The current plan is to implement support for the OAuth WRAP specification in Facebook Connect sometime next year.
The OAuth protocol originally developed in 2007 is now getting support from all the major players in the business that are recognizing the need and the power of an open standard adopted industry-wide. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are also actively working to develop the new protocol.
Equally important though is the decision to implement it on FriendFeed for now, which looks like it will serve as a testing ground for new technology from Facebook. The social network acquired the startup earlier this year and many have been wondering what lies ahead for FriendFeed. While this is likely not what many had in mind it does show that, at least for the moment, Facebook will continue to support the service. The early implementation of the OAuth WRAP protocol is now live on FriendFeed for third-party developers to test out.