First Public Draft: Taking the Wraps off of OAuth 2.0
The OAuth 2.0 draft specification is out there. The efforts the group working on the specification are paying off in the form of an IETF working group submission. One thing that is clear is that there is a natural tension in following the processes of IETF and the hyper-innovation cycle of web standards that are now powered by the growth of social media. In this world, keeping up with all the work in the community itself is feat by itself. As proven recently, even aligning the naming of standards in our small community (xAuth, XAuth) proves challenging enough. With that said, we’ll share we what we’ve learned about this version and what work has been incorporated in it. Sponsor For those coming up to speed on the issues surrounding OAuth 2.0, here is a brief summary of the state of the union: The OAuth Working Group in IETF generated a first draft of OAuth 2.0 . This group that is credited with this document consists of active leaders of both the Twitter API team as well as Facebook community standards team. A robust number of daily discussions are happening in the working group hosted at IETF include topics such as the default use of JSON that show the opportunity and challenge of growing the standard from a web-based to a broader set of devices and scenarios. One of the stated goals of the IETF OAuth working group is to maintain backwards compatibility with OAuth 1.0. From our sampling of the depth of change in scope and conceptualization of the standard, this may be a big deal for the group, especially if key members decide to legacy their support for the first versions. As part of the evolution of OAuth, there is the case of the OAuth WRAP Google Group . This group has forged ahead to develop profiles for scenarios seen as extensions to the profile OAuth 1.0A. This includes new ways to gain tokens bringing the use cases of Javascript or RIA applications. WRAP also redefines the dependency on SSL and provides a simpler way to get started using tools easily accessible to the web resource. With some changes noted, this work has been brought forward in the OAuth 2.0 public draft. David Recordon, a chief thought leader in the open web (also employee at Facebook) recently offered this summary ” What’s going on with OAuth ?” to help align the understanding of the evolution of the standard. Here we show one of the better known descriptions of the OAuth flow as provided by Yahoo. The annotations show a few of the areas that are under consideration for changes in OAuth 2.0 and/or in the work done in the OAuth WRAP group. Last week, at Twitter’s Chirp ’10 the Twitter API team gave this presentation, ” Too many secrets, but never enough: OAuth at Twitter “. This document contains overview of the basic process of Twitter, commitment to the movement to OAuth 2.0, and discussion of Twitter’s xAuth and OAuth Echos projects. Twitter Likes to Optimize Twitter is deeply intertwined with the inception and direction of OAuth. The company is both involved in the specifications but also is a lightening rod for discussion in the development community. In the Twitter blogs and developer groups, OAuth is being considered deeply in the trade-offs in implementation, design, and risk in the Twitter ecosystem. A few areas under discussion is how to remove the re-direction from the process, and also how to keep a running log of all account client accesses available to the user as a way to make sure users are aware and signaling proper account use. The Twitter API team has been willing to make change happen in the community by deprecating legacy processes, such as basic auth. With the changes coming in OAuth 2.0 the company may be in the best position to bootstrap developer adoption of the new standards. In this way, OAuth 2.0 need to adapt to the speed and need of the Twitter use cases, to avoid becoming like XML. XML is a good thing, of course, but when push comes to shove, JSON is lighter weight and more compact. This is helping it become the preference for data attribute exchange in APIs like Twitters that support OAuth. With the rise of the social ecosystem as the hub for authorization, it is becoming clear that the IETF efforts need Twitter as much as Twitter needs the IETF. This seems like a good balance that will guide use cases along the way to practical standards formalization. There are a lot of questions out there about OAuth 2.0. Top of mind is whether this technology release will see the effective join of Twitter, Facebook, and Google? Or, will the practical matters of business and strategy keep the standards intact, and the implementations as islands? What is your prediction for OAuth 2.0 and web resource authorization? Discuss
Twitter Archive is Nothing Without Tools, Funding
When Twitter announced last week that every public tweet since its inception in 2006 would be archived in the Library of Congress, many people were excited. “The Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life,” says James Billington , Librarian of Congress. “Anyone who wants to understand how an ever-broadening public is using social media to engage in an ongoing debate regarding social and cultural issues will have need of this material.” Sponsor Developing the Methods to Curate Twitter There is little doubt that the opportunity for scholarship is immense – for cultural anthropologists, for historians of technology, and for academics in any number of fields. But some scholars are uncertain as to whether the resource will live up to the potential. With estimates of over 50 million tweets per day, the Library of Congress archives will contain a massive amount of data. “A MySQL dump from the Twitter database doesn’t make an archive,” says digital historian Tom Scheinfeldt . Scheinfeldt and other scholars agree that the move could be “tremendously useful,” it will only be so if the proper tools and methodology are developed. Scholars are faced with the challenge of designing and building the curatorial tools for evaluating the data in the Twitter archives. But how will you be able to isolate a single conversation? How can you isolate the social graph of those involved? What sorts of API will be developed, both for internal and for external research? And while addition of annotations to Twitter will likely help for tracking future tweets, similar tools still need to be devised for archived data. Is There Commitment to Digital Scholarship? The donation of the Twitter archive seems like a great gesture. However, it remains to be seen if the preservation of social media information, including Twitter, will be a priority, both for the government and the technology industry. Although the Library of Congress and the National Archives have been committed to digital archiving for a number of years, programs like the Digital Preservation Program , have been historically underfunded . As historian Scheinfeldt notes, the announcement of the Library of Congress’s acquisition of the Twitter archives is really just “the beginning of the story.” Scholars like Scheinfeldt hope to be an active voice in shaping how the rest of the story plays out. Discuss
Maponics Releases "Ultra-Local" Data Internationally
The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities. Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth. Sponsor The company uses a combination of proprietary algorithmic and manual methods to determine where a neighborhood begins and ends; boundaries are updated quarterly. The data becomes most exciting when it’s cross-referenced with other data sets. Twitter users, for example, will now be able to geotag and view Tweets by neighborhood in countries all over the world. If you’re interested in learning more about Maponics, its sector and its relationship with Twitter, check out the excellent podcast interview DirectionsMag did with CEO Darrin Clement two weeks ago . Discuss
500 Billion Impressions: 16% of Users Generate Majority of Brand Impressions on Social Media Sites
Today, about 145 million Internet users in the U.S. use social web applications. In total, all of these users generate close to 500 billion online impressions on each other. According to a new report from Forrester Research , a mere 16% of online consumers generate a grand total of 80% of these peer-to-peer online impressions. Over 60% of all of these impressions come from Facebook. Sponsor Peer Influence Rivals Traditional Media As Forrester’s Augie Ray and Josh Bernoff point out in this new report, 500 billion influence impressions about products on social networks, product ratings sites and blogs, comes close to rivaling other mass media outlets. Online ad impressions, for example, numbered around 2 trillion last year. Facebook is the venue for 62% of all of these influence impressions, followed by MySpace (18%), Twitter (10%) and LinkedIn (6%). Ratings and reviews make up 32% of these impressions, discussion forums account for 29%, blog comments for 24% and blog posts for 16%. As Forrester’s analysts rightly note, it would be easy to dismiss Twitter, given that it only accounts for 10% of all of these influence impressions. These users, however, tend to be the “connected of the connected,” which makes Twitter an ideal place to engage mass influencers. One caveat we would add here, however, is that it is hard to equate a post on Twitter or Facebook with actually impressions. Even though a user can have 1 million followers on Twitter, chances are that only a small number of these followers will actually see this message. It’s also not clear how many users actually read blog comments and actively read ratings on sites like Amazon and Newegg. The study’s authors acknowledge this in a footnote, but also note that they consider 500 billion impressions to be a conservative estimate. Who Are the Influencers? For marketers, of course, it is important to reach these 16% of mass influencers. Forrester divides these influencers into two groups: mass connectors , who maintain very large social networks, and mass mavens , who don’t just maintain a large social network, but also have a strong desire to share their knowledge about a certain subject. On average, mass connectors tend to have a slightly higher household income ($98,100) than mass mavens ($89,000). These connectors are also slightly younger (32 vs. 38) and more likely to use the mobile Internet (55% vs. 46%). Discuss
What Twitter Annotations Mean
I love to sit on the beach. One of the coolest things about the beach is the number of layers of visual depth. Look at the sand and it’s beautiful, but zoom your eyes in closer and you’ll see a whole layer of life running around on the sand that you didn’t see before. Look even closer and you can see individual grains of sand, water and light dancing between them. Look closer still and you see that each grain of sand is a unique object with its own texture. If your eyes are strong enough, or you have a machine to help you, you can see even more layers by looking closer still. That’s what Twitter is going to be like with the launch of Twitter Annotations this Summer. It’s a beautiful vision, with huge potential, but there’s another way to look at this analogy: you don’t build on the beach sand because it shifts too much. Will Annotations live up to its incredible promise? Sponsor What Annotations Are Last week Twitter announced a forthcoming feature called Twitter Annotations: it’s a system for almost any metadata to be connected to any Twitter message when it’s published. Inside every Tweet is now a space where you could put or find anything, including links out to further instructions or larger bodies of information. That’s always been the case with the 140 characters of content – but now we’re talking about systematic metadata intended for machines, to augment the content. The idea is dripping with potential, but also some risk. Isn’t much of life’s meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? Twitter has been considering adding Annotations for at least two years, according to Platform Team member Raffi Krikorian. That’s a relatively large portion of the company’s young life. Every time a new bit of metadata was added to Tweets, like geolocation information was last Fall, the company would ask itself “should we be doing this, or should we just open up the platform for and and all metadata?” Now the company has decided to do just that. Twitter publishing tools can now add a description to any tweet their users publish, not as a part of the 140 character message, but as a small machine-readable metadata field that travels along with the content. What might this look like? We could see Annotations fields like: Link to a media file, like podcast enclosures, photos linked to, etc. Context about the Tweet like where was the author when it was published, maybe what the weather was like there at the time. Your Twitter publishing interface could offer you a special option to write reviews of movies, books, or links you’re sharing. The ISBN of the book, a link to a preview of the movie and the number of stars in your rating could be included in the Tweet Annotations. Any way you can classify, describe, append or otherwise enrich a Tweet with words or numbers can be included in Annotations. You Tweet, you (or more likely your Twitter app) attach a characteristic or quality, you define the characteristic and then you provide a value of how or what that Tweet did relative to the quality being referenced. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and more will make it easy for users to add these annotations. Yes, this is meaningful in large part because of the 140 character limit on Twitter messages themselves, but isn’t much of life’s meaning found in the play between limits and the infinite? From Annotations Come Analysis Annotating a single Tweet is uninteresting, it’s when you hit the Twitter databases and gather together all the Tweets that share a characteristic that things get exciting. When those selected Tweets can then be cross-referenced with other sets of data from outside Twitter – that’s when the word fecund starts feeling inadequate. Show me all the Tweets from my friends that have links to music and play me those songs. Twitter clients like Seesmic, Tweetdeck and others are going to make viewing that kind of data a whole lot easier. Tweetmeme’s Nick Halstead believes that Annotations will be used most extensively to communicate webhooks, links to instructions for a Twitter client to follow. He thinks it will enable game play and help Twitter start acquiring more users again. “Because of the size of the data you can put in the annotations, I think people will come up with links to offsite resources. Seesmic is building their own platform for Windows to support plug-ins, but this reaches much further, but this lets Twitter clients augment a tweet with other services. Sf you were Stocktweets, you could attach a link in the namespace that’s in stocktweets, Seesmic could follow that link back to Stocktweets and ask it how to render it. So you could put a chart and any other associated information. It’s like FBML [Facebook Markup Language], the ability to embed applications inside the Twitter clients. Maybe threaded conversations. A game of Scrabble where the link points at a currently rendered scrabble board, so other people could look at the board and join in playing it. Annotations and webhooks would allow gaming to start happening on Twitter.” Halstead believes an Alpha version of Annotations could be made available to developers in a month. How about showing me all the Tweets from anyone that are referencing the President of the United States (subject: POTUS?), analyze the sentiment in the messages, show me where those Twitter users were located and tell me how those local sentiments change over time. Send me an alert when one of those starts to shift radically. Show me all the Tweets by people in their 20′s and in their 50′s (imagine an author age tag in Annotations, why not?), living near the site of a disastrous event. How do those discussions differ? There are all kinds of interesting questions that could be tackled when the developer world’s imagination runs wild on the terms of description applied to our messages. Of course it will be tempting to draw all kinds of conclusions from this rich data. We’ll surely be able to draw a whole lot of value from it. “You can learn something from almost anything,” Big Data cruncher and 80Legs CEO Shion Deysarkar says. “Just give me enough data, I’ll figure out something.” But let’s keep in mind the words of social network scientist danah boyd, who wrote the following on her blog this morning: Time and time again, I see computational scientists mistake behavioral traces for cultural logic…Big Data creates tremendous opportunities for those who know how to assess the context of the data and ask the right questions into it. But mucking with Big Data alone is not research. And seeing patterns in Big Data is not the same as hypothesis testing. Patterns invite more questions than they answer. Tweet Power Politics Twitter’s Krikorian says the site will probably list “trending annotations” just like it lists trending topics today. There will probably be a wiki where anyone can find out what namespaces are being used for what purposes. Really though, the classification system is going to be determined by the market. That’s something that worries a lot of people. “People who believe in building standards are conerned about our blase attitude about how we want to run annotations,” Krikorian says. He believes that the developer community will work things out for itself, just as it has in the past. “There has been a lot of emergent behavior around how to relate to tweets anyway, without our imposing much structure around it. The Twitter platform is continuously evolving – the developers will figure it out. Twitter developers iterate in public.” That’s likely to be cold comfort for people focused on the power of structured data standards. Many people are calling for Twitter to embrace the well-built efforts of the Semantic Web community. Krikorian says that 90% of Twitter developers don’t know what the Semantic Web is but that there’s certainly room for standards lovers to work within the Annotations scheme. It’s not just about standards, either. “We need serious consideration from folks who know their stuff before we create a convention,” says Teresa Boze , who suggested the American Society of Indexers in particular. It’s hard to think that creating a giant living library without consulting some librarians is a good idea. The absence of standard terminology could really be a problem. Annotations can’t be changed retroactively, either. Krikorian says that major players will dominate the obvious use cases for Annotations and the company will monitor and highlight really innovative Annotations developed by people on the margins. We’ll see how well that will work. Imagination will make the sky the limit for this publishing platform used easily by more than 100 million people around the world. But a shortage of forethought, planning and agreed-upon standards may bring that platform’s aspirations back down to earth quickly in the future. Time will tell. Discuss