With the Spring 2012 release, Janrain introduced several new remote provisioning and application management features, and core platform capabilities making it easy for its platform partners to offer a rich set of social features and customizations to their customers.

Remote Provisioning and Management

Several new API calls have been added to the Janrain Partner API to offer greater flexibility with remote configuration and management of Janrain Engage application instances from within the partner’s platform. Partners can now enable their customers to configure additional identity providers, reset their API key, add and remove administrators associated with their Engage application as well as request additional social data from their end-users at registration-time, all from within the partner’s platform.

Additional Integration Options

The OAuth2 compliant Backplane 2.0 protocol now facilitates the transfer of sensitive user information between applications through a secure server-side flow. With the release of Backplane 2.0, partner platforms have more than one mechanism of integrating social login offered by Janrain with their platform – the Engage API, the Plugin API and Backplane.

New Core Platform Features

Janrain’s platform partners can now offer their customers the following additional capabilities:

• Expanded Social Sharing: Enable customers’ end-users to share to a select group of friends/contacts, to their social networking walls or via email with the new social sharing widget and APIs.

• Additional Identity Providers: Offer end-users’ the ability to login with Asian providers such as Sina Weibo, Mixi, and RenRen in addition to Germany-based SoundCloud.

• Support for Regulated Industries: For partner platforms offering hosting, content management or tools for regulated industries, federal agencies, state, or local government websites, Janrain’s support for FICAM LoA1-compliant identity providers, makes it possible to offer frictionless registration via social/3rd party login on their websites.
• 3rd Party Analytics Integrations: Janrain’s widgets support JavaScript event hooks to measure registration, login and sharing events from within a platform customer’s analytics systems such as Google Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, CoreMetrics or Webtrends.
• Mobile Configuration and Development: Platform customers who utilize the Janrain dashboard for configuration of identity providers and widget layouts can customize and test the look and feel of social login and sharing UIs for iOS or Android-based mobile web and app experiences.
• Application Framework Support: Platform partners who develop mobile applications using Apache Cordova/PhoneGap, can use the Janrain Engage for iOS and Android PhoneGap plugin.
• Traditional Login Buttons: By simply adding a custom branded login button that represents a site specific id/password to the Janrain Engage sign-in widget, platform customers eliminate the need for username and password boxes on their sign-in interface.

Redesigned Documentation

Lastly, with the goal of making it easier to navigate Janrain’s rich set of capabilities, Janrain launched its new Developer portal, complete with quick-start guides, code examples and comprehensive API documentation.

If you are a current Janrain partner, we that hope you will immediately begin taking advantage of the above capabilities. We look forward to hearing your feedback at products@janrain.com.

To learn more about becoming a Janrain partner, please visit www.janrain.com/partners

When we started this project, we held briefings with several Janrain customers across various verticals (Online Retail, News Media, Entertainment, Online Guides) to hear firsthand which metrics would help them measure the effectiveness of their social media efforts. There was a consistent theme in their responses:

• Social logins by new and returning users over 7- day and 30- day periods
• Drill down of login data by domain to measure the effectiveness of campaigns
• Ability to compare the percentage of logged in users who also shared content or site activities to social networks
• Data export so that they may compare and contrast it with other online marketing initiatives

Based on this feedback and our market assessment, we then went to work and built a new analytics dashboard and reporting system. Key highlights of Janrain Engage social analytics include:

• Trends & Provider Distribution: Track trends and popular providers used for social sign-ins, posts, and resulting referrals.
• User Intelligence: Measure recency (time between user visits to site), frequency of user visits, user’s social activity (measured by the number of posts) and influence (measured by referral traffic generated to site).
• Expanded Date Ranges: Monitor trends and run reports over various date ranges – 7, 30, 60 and 90.
• Drill Down Reporting and Data Export: Drill down on logins, posts and referrals by new vs. returning users, social networks and platforms used, and domains.

The screen shot below showcases the new analytics dashboard.

We hope our customers enjoy the new analytics and always look forward to hearing feedback. Please login to your Janrain Engage product dashboard and let us know what you think.

Eager to take advantage of this behavior and the diminishing need for online anonymity, websites ranging from online guides to news media and entertainment sites to retail websites are enabling their readers to build social communities around content and discussions.

Today, Janrain is happy to announce deep technical integrations with the three leading commenting platforms: Disqus, Echo and Pluck, to make it easy to link a user’s existing online identity on your website with his or her commenting persona.

• DISQUS builds and connects communities via a large and rapidly growing network that spans over 200 million users each month, and provides publishers with advanced commenter interface and moderation tools.“DISQUS is proud to work with another industry leader, Janrain, in making social connectivity a more comprehensive and integrated experience for publishers everywhere” stated Ro Gupta, vice president of business development for DISQUS.

• Echo allows publishers to turn their static sites into real-time news platforms with Real-time Comments, Real-time Recent Comments and Real-time News Rivers.“At Echo, our focus is partnering with the leading web properties in the world to bring state of the art real-time social features to their audience. Our goal is to be an invisible toolset that empowers publishers to innovate by integrating seamlessly with their identity and registration systems. Our partnership with Janrain is just another way we ensure that Echo is supportive of our publisher’s business goals and existing technologies” stated Chris Saad, vice president of product strategy & community for Echo.

• Pluck Comments is an element of the larger Pluck Social Application Server, a platform that drives community for publishers like USA Today and brands like the NFL. Pluck Comments is designed for sites that generate very large volumes of comments, at very high transaction rates, and is supported by versatile discovery features.“We are happy to partner with Janrain to provide our customers with a more complete solution for bridging their own online communities with popular destinations like Facebook and Twitter,” said Jason Jaynes, vice president of products and marketing for Demand Media. “Janrain Engage simplifies the process by which visitors register for community membership, by making it easy for them to use their Facebook credentials or some other non-anonymous identity. Our customers benefit from the social bridging that Janrain facilitates with more site traffic, greater visitor engagement, and higher value conversations on their sites.”

Janrain’s integration enables a website to easily register users with their identities on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google, then use this identity in online conversations, including automatically sharing their comments with their social networks.

The benefits to websites of implementing commenting platforms and integrating online identities to commenting systems are simple and obvious:

• Quick and easy registration for users
• Crowdsourcing of content
• Building a thriving community around subject matter experts
• Identifying and rewarding active contributors
• Popularizing content beyond the confines of your website

As Social Media guru, Brian Solis, points out in his book Engage, “Social networks and platforms have expanded the roles of customers and peers from consumer to authorities, ambassadors and critics.”  Janrain Engage enables websites to turn your casual visitors into brand ambassadors by making it easy to build integrated and cohesive online experiences with leading commenting platforms.

If you are already using or considering using one of the above commenting platforms and would like to learn more about integrating a user’s identity on social networks with your website, please contact us. Packaged integrations with each of the commenting solutions are available at the Janrain Engage Pro subscription level.