[Developers] Google Friend Connect and Acre

[Jim Pick]

Jason Douglas wrote:

>> 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?

I guess I meant where you log in to.  When you log into a Friend Connect 
gadget on a web page, you are really logging into a service provided by 
Google (although you can use a OpenID or Yahoo account to log in). 
That's what I meant by client-side authentication, since it's only done 
with JavaScript.

But I imagine that you might want to put the gadgets on a webpage that 
is only shown after a user has logged in to a server -- that's what I 
meant by server-side authentication.

Having two separate logins is sort of clunky, I think.  I imagine there 
might be a way to make the Open Social login the only one you need to do 
(plus one-time setup of OAuth authorization tokens, etc.).

> 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.

I think that's a good start.

> 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).

Yep.  Once there's the ability to write into FreeBase from Acre, I 
imagine that this could be done.  Is the idea that I'll be able to bind 
my user credentials into one of my own Acre applications so that it can 
be used for writing (even when I'm not the person using the app)? 
Obviously, I'm not going to check in my username/password.  But an 
opaque token that only worked from a specific URL should get the job 
done, I would think.

Cheers,

  - Jim