Soocial blog

Last Tuesday Spif and myself were at Kings of Code and I had the opportunity to hold a short talk on OAuth and why such an authentication mechanism is so crucial.

What is basically boils down to is that it’s brilliant that 2008 is shaping up to be a year of ‘openness’ with OpenID, Open Social, open API’s etc … but the thought of all this openness without a proper authentication mechanism that gives the users full control is scary to say the least.

Far too many sites, especially social networks, are asking for usernames and passwords to services such as online email in order to find buddies in the network by matching them with email addresses in your address book. LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, for example, will all try and grab your contacts in GMail in order to add them as contacts.

Now there’s nothing wrong with sharing data between services, I fully encourage it, but surrendering control by giving your username and password is insane.

This is one of the problems that OAuth tackles. OAuth is an authentication mechanism that gives the user full control of their data, who gets access to it and when. It does so without sharing passwords.

We at Soocial are fully committed to giving our users full control over their contact data and feel that this topic is one that needs more attention. To get people up to speed, we’re organizing an informal afternoon where business deciders and developers can learn about OAuth. Leave your email address at OAuthternoon and we’ll let you know when we have the details sorted.