[Developers] Google Friend Connect and Acre

[Jason Douglas]

On Dec 4, 2008, at 3:34 PM, Jim Pick wrote:

> I'm not exactly sure how it will work.  Right now, people can leave
> comments, but they could already do that by signing up with Freebase.
>
> Mostly, I just want to play with the APIs.  But I'm hoping that a rich
> ecosystem of gadgets pop up.

Me too.  That's one of the main reasons we did Acre... as a
glue/mashup platform for all of this stuff.  :-)


> For the Vancouver base, I can imagine a system where I might start a
> topic, and then ask a friend to fill out more of it.  Or an  
> application
> that might give award points to people who add or refine data.

The system that allows people to vote on topic merges and deletes might
be repurpose-able for something like this... maybe we can rally some  
people
to prototype that.


> One way it is interesting is that anybody with a Google Account, Yahoo
> Account, or OpenID can sign in without having to set up another  
> account.
>
> I'm a little unclear on how this integrates with server side
> authentication.  A user now has to sign in to a site on the server  
> side
> as well as on the client side.  Maybe in the future, for some apps,
> users will only sign in on the client side, and do all the server side
> stuff via an OAuth API?

I'm not getting what you mean by client-side vs. server-side  
authentication.
Can you expand on that?

What's planned for freebaseapps.com is that a user won't ever log into  
the app
directly... they'll just be asked to approve the app using their  
freebase.com
account and then the app will be able to write for them (the facts  
will still be
attributed to them).

We have started to look at allowing people to use other accounts to  
write to
freebase, but there isn't anything as imminent there.



Putting those last two questions together -- and I don't even know if  
this is
actually possible --  but it could be interesting to experiment with  
having
people vote in Friend Connect using whatever ID and then when there's
a consensus, write to the Vancouver base using your own credentials
(or a new "Vancover base community" user).

-jason