Everyone is getting into the Sharing Data Space
Ma.gnolia.com is also getting in on the act.
From a webpost on the Ma.gnolia.com blog, they are releasing a new specification called Open Authentication specification (OAuth).
The thing is though, they are calling it Open Authentication but really, it's not just authentication, it's actually also (maybe sneakily) authorisation too. Authorisation to your data, that's what.
Using Open Authentication certainly does allow one site (the web app) to confirm with another (the identity server) that you are who you say you are. But there is more to it than that...
It also allows the web app to gain access - on your say-so of course - to your private data on the identity server.
(As an aside, I think that Open Authentication, or OAuth, is actually a misnomer and really should be named something else.)
This can be most easily thought of as an example where a photograph printing site wants access to a user's images at their favourite image sharing site.
This OAuth specification is along the same lines as quite a number of different specifications which allow for authentication and authorisation of data access which are vying for adoption throughout the rest of the web. Much like what I said last week about the possibility of Google opening out their authentication/authorisation, it'll be interesting from here on in and the good thing is, if there is enough people looking at the problem and creating solutions, the best one will probably win - or maybe the biggest one.
One thing I forgot to mention in last week's post is about the type of data that can be shared. For example, having Ma.gnolia as your identify server and your data manager will give you access to your bookmarks from other web apps if given authorisation, but from this provider, that's all you can get at - since that's all they keep.
Opposed to this is some new abilities within Google Mashups which allow you to store any type of data against each user. When it was first released, you could only access the ${app} variable (I need to confirm this) but now there is a ${user} variable too.
So again, this is another step along the road where you'll actually be able to create and store anything with anyone and access it from anywhere, on the assumption that Google's new API allows this.
That's a lot of options and very much inline with the true spirit of the web.
Life is good.
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.