What is Backplane Protocol?

Backplane Protocol solves a key interoperability problem that emerged when brands started integrating multiple 3rd party web applications like real-time commenting, social login and game mechanics into their sites in order to provide web visitors with a modern, social user experience. Backplane Protocol serves as a “message bus” for social applications, enabling applications developed by disparate vendors to communicate with each other in real-time.

How does this add value for websites and their users?

Gone are the days of disparate component technologies acting as “walled gardens” on a site.  Backplane Protocol ensures an optimal user experience by eliminating the need for consumers to identify themselves multiple times to different applications on a website.

As an example, The Sun, which is one of the United Kingdom’s largest daily newspapers, is using Janrain Engage to power its site-wide authentication and Livefyre as its commenting solution.  Through Backplane Protocol, a reader on the site can register via Janrain, or sign up via Livefyre to post a comment, and her identity is immediately recognized by both applications.

Backplane Protocol builds on proven and popular open standards work by leveraging technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, and Portable Contacts. As a proposed open standard, it reduces the need for companies and independent developers to learn and develop against other vendors’ proprietary APIs.

For ease of integration, Backplane Protocol can be quickly added to any page, application, or login system using a little bit of JavaScript, reducing time to market and costs in website publisher deployments. If you are a Janrain customer please check out our documentation for how to implement Backplane on your site. Janrain also operates Backplane servers as a service that is available to all Janrain customers.

Calling Application Vendors

If you are an application vendor looking to make your app Backplane compliant please check out the following documentation and drop us a note for some extra guidance through the process or to provide suggestions about our implementation of the Backplane Protocol.

Application providers that currently or plan to support the Backplane Protocol include: Echo, Janrain, 500 Friends, Arktan, BigDoor, BunchBall, Crowd Factory, Envolve, JetJaw, Livefyre, Realtidbits, Stocial, and Tokbox.

Looking for more information?

More information about the specification and community surrounding Backplane Protocol can be found on the newly launched Backplane Exchange site. This site is designed for brand website owners, application developers and server operators to learn about the protocol and exchange ideas to help fuel its adoption.

How we use these devices is also continuing to evolve. IBM just released some very impressive benchmarks, showing that 13.4% of online buyers on Christmas Day made their purchases from Apple iPads and iPhones this year. This is on top of a general 16% growth in online sales from Christmas Day 2010.

Flurry Analytics’ recent update on their Appy Christmas study shows 140% growth in app downloads.

All of this translates into a larger market opportunity for developers building iOS Apps. On the other hand, with so many other apps in the marketplaces, this makes it harder for developers to create useful apps that can be easily found.

Connect to social to drive engagement, retention and discovery

Janrain provides a few key capabilities that help improve your app’s experience and aid in app discovery through the major social networks:

• Encourage engagement and acquire new users: Our SDK enables your users to share content, awards, status and more to multiple social networks, email or SMS. Your app’s users become evangelists when they broadcast from your applications to their friends and contacts. This is a great opportunity to drive their friends to download from within the shared message.
• Improved registration experience: Give your users a head start by adding social sign-in to your app reducing the amount of effort they need to expend creating yet another account.

Highlights from our latest update for iOS5

Last week we released the latest version of our iOS SDK for Engage that includes a few key additions.

• Formalized support for iOS 5/Xcode 4
• Improved support for orientation changes
• New preview UI element in sharing dialog. 
• Pick which providers to display – configurable at run-time so that you can have different options exposed in your app than your Website.
• Improved flexibility of activity sharing to allow activities without a URL- e.g. Share achievements, status, content and more.
• Replaced previous JSON parsing library with improved design that is faster with iOS 5
• As always, fixed minor bugs

Want to see it in action?

We have just released updates to our sample sign-in and publishing apps with our latest SDK.

Interested in learning more?

• iOS SDK Documentation
• Get the Library 
• Android SDK Documentation

Janrain Engage for Sonny

WordPress 3.3 Sonny, launched earlier this month and we have since released a new version of our Janrain Engage for WordPress plugin including our latest social login widget and some cool new features.

Highlighted new features

• Supports WordPress version 3.3
• Updated with latest Janrain Social Login Widget
• See which Social Providers people are logging in with on your site. This information is included in the Users section of your WordPress Dashboard.
• Added new WordPress shortcodes to easily personalize content that is different for visitors that are and aren’t logged into the site.

Janrain Capture for Magento Extension Released

Now it is even easier to integrate Janrain’s hosted registration into your sites built using the Magento platform. Our latest Janrain Capture for Magento Extension integrates seamlessly with the Janrain Engage plugin (social login and social sharing) we released earlier in 2011.

• Centralized and hosted user profile database
• Integrated with Janrain Engage to sign in with a variety of social identity providers
• Supports single sign-on

Please note that you need to license Janrain Capture to use this extension.