A Social Software Suite (SSS) is a consolidated set of social web applications across multiple use cases that share a common user interface and data interchange. The suite enables corporations to manage online relationships and activities with their internal and external customers

The idea behind this is right on and as we look at other digital industries, we have seen the consolidation and emergence of platforms – email marketing, content management, and customer relationship management are just a few. Also, as we have seen, it will take time for vendors to consolidate to form a SSS.

So knowing that a marketplace needs to mature at its natural rate, which is happening much faster and faster these days, how do we fulfill the immediate need of the customer while not creating the bad kind of disruption in the marketplace? A couple years ago Echo and Janrain collaborated on the development of an open protocol called Backplane, which is basically a secure, back channel messaging protocol that allows applications to talk to one another.

Now this doesn’t solve all the problems outlined by Jeremiah, but it does address his point as mentioned in the article:

They seek a common set of vendors to emerge that they don’t have to constantly coach on R&D and integration partners, and are waiting for maturity in products and consolidation so they have to analyze less vendors.  Secondly, as social integrates with all other incumbent software, the need for suites to emerge are only underscored.

The important thing here is that customers – website owners – are faced with having to deal with one-off integration after one-off integration which results in the aforementioned frustration. This is why the Backplane Protocol was originally developed and why the community has pushed the standard forward to be more encompassing and create greater value.  The Backplane Protocol as it stands today gives website owners the ability to have half of a SSS, the other half will have to come with time, as the market matures.

As we look at the marketplace maturing, how do you think application vendors are going to be able to quickly and effectively develop a social software suite. We see today that when one technology company acquires another, it can be 6-18 months or more before the end user starts to see signs of integration and common experiences. By removing the hurdle of apps being able to talk to one another, the focus can be moved to developing a unified user experience and interface. If you have worked in a company that has acquired technology or merged with another technology organization, you know the frustrations of making systems work together and Backplane helps simplify these issues.

By removing roadblocks like Jeremiah outlined, it eases the sales cycle for app vendors, allows them to create more customized, higher value solutions for customers and reduce the frustrations that website owners will invariably come to face with. For website owners, the Backplane Protocol allows you to  provide more integrated activities for your users, improve the user experience, and create seamless engagement across your site all at a lower cost and quicker deployment time.

As we have seen the rise of open source over the years, we have seen complexity and the number of vendors grow equally. I am asking you to take a look at what Jeremiah wrote and then look at the Backplane Protocol website and see if you are interested in participating in the OpenID Work Group or in using Backplane for your website or application. Better yet, give me your thoughts on how we, as an industry, can meet the needs of customers looking for a Social Software Suite?

For website owners, enabling web applications to talk to one another within the same web page can be frustrating and can take countless hours of development. How should apps communicate with each other in a meaningful way? The OpenID Foundation’s new Backplane Protocol Work Group is focused on this exact problem — helping website owners, application developers and systems integrators simply and securely integrate apps from different providers into a seamless user experience.

Read the whole announcement on the OpenID Foundation blog.

Interesting new technologies shaking up the identity world include the new OpenID Connect standard which is currently “functionally complete” and now exists as an implementer’s draft.  OpenID Connect provides identity services over the top of the successful OAuth2 protocol.  Several technology companies demonstrated prototypes of how distributed claims may be presented in one unified context.  This is an interesting development, moving forward from a paradigm of one identity provider being the sole source of all claims in a particular session.  Attribute brokering was discussed at the last meeting six months ago, but at this workshop it was clear that the ecosystem was still growing steadily.

Several multi-factor authentication technology demos were presented from simple integration with a secondary device like your smart phone verifying your identity via a pin to analyzing blood vessel patterns in your hand with the phone’s camera.  There was a cool hardware device enabling on the fly configuration of different security standards to protect a set of resources.  Mozilla demonstrated their innovative “Persona” product based on BrowserID.  Rather than tip off the identity provider that you are logging into your favorite site, BrowserID embeds your credentials in the user agent.  One attendee expressed concern that BrowserID was “yet another identity protocol” but new ideas were generally welcomed at this workshop.

And, of course, the attendees visited the contentious “privacy” space and what it means in today’s Internet.  Are we entitled to it, how and when?  Who owns our data?  In one session, an interesting discussion ensued on how to balance an attribute provider’s responsibility to silo and secure user data while still having the flexibility to verify and assert some authority about the data.  In an era where we occasionally see large wholesale data breaches, balancing privacy, availability and trust is a big issue to get right.

I also found the engineering “best practices” sessions interesting.  One was a deep dive into the finer grained details of the OAuth2 bearer token and the best approaches to securing this resource.  How does a trusted partner application refresh an access token when they don’t possess the refresh token or the client credentials?  How does this life-cycle flow work?  Questions like these are not addressed in the specifications and are intentionally left out-of-scope for various reasons.  Several interesting approaches were proposed, but to me the best part of the session was simply to work through familiar problems with some very smart people.

Fellow Janrain engineer Johnny Bufu and I also presented two sessions on the new Backplane 2 protocol.  Vlad Skvortsov, Vice President of Engineering from Janrain partner Echo joined us for the second session to help discuss the details of building an implementation for the new protocol, which Janrain released as open source software (https://github.com/janrain/janrain-backplane-2) the day before the workshop.  Backplane 2.0 is an exciting new secure messaging framework built on top of the OAuth2 protocol.  See http://backplanex.com for more details.

I left the conference feeling like the Conversation was just starting.  There were so many new ideas to digest and many existing technologies to learn more about.  Stay tuned!

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.

Last week, Team Janrain headed to Mountain View, CA to define and build the next generation of Internet Identity with industry leaders at the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW). Over the years, IIW has been the premiere event where technologists from around the web roll up their sleeves to work on making Internet Identity portable, interoperable, and secure. 

OpenID Connect – Identity for OAuth 2.0

One of the biggest topics at IIW was OpenID Connect, which is the standard identity interface for OAuth 2.0. OpenID Connect standardizes on the the same wildly successful design pattern that has been deployed by top Identity Providers including Facebook and Twitter. Not only is OpenID Connect  far easier to implement relative to previous versions of OpenID, it enables powerful new use cases for attribute brokering and data sharing.

Attribute Brokering – Tearing Down the Data Silos

OpenID Connect enables Attribute Brokering, in which claims and attributes about a user can be aggregated from multiple sources, independently of the user’s identity provider. Google’s Eric Sachs gave a fascinating talk explaining how mobile carriers can become attribute providers by asserting (with user consent) a user’s verified postal address and billing information when a user logs into a website using their OpenID Connect enabled Google Account.

User profile data which was previously trapped within data silos owned by the large Identity Providers can be unlocked and asserted by independent attribute providers, all keyed off of a single OpenID Connect account.  User profile data can be spread across many different Attribute Providers, giving users more control over their privacy, while enabling web sites to build richer, more personalized experiences.

Backplane – Enabling Plug and Play Web Widgets

Many websites embed 3rd party javascript widgets that implement social functionality including commenting, sharing, voting, and chatting.  Because widgets are hosted on different domains than the sites that embed them, it’s been challenging for widget developers to synchronize data between widgets and the sites that embed them.  Backplane is a standard interface that solves this problem, enabling widgets to communicate securely with each other and with the site that embeds them.

Backplane was originally proposed by Echo as a way to enable websites to embed interoperable, real time, social widgets from different vendors, allowing apps to be decoupled from the user’s identity provider. Last week around IIW, Janrain’s Johnny Bufu and Echo’s Chris Saad, along with engineers from widget developers including Livefyre,  Badgeville, Crowdfactory, and Envolve, kicked off a series of sessions to finalize Backplane 2.0. We hope to see Backplane power a new widget ecosystem, in which site owners can easy deploy the best of breed widgets by dragging and dropping them onto their site.

Next Up – Open Identity Attribute Exchange Summit

As with the rest of the Internet, the future of Internet Identity is evolving quickly.  Janrain will be participating at the Open Identity Attribute Exchange Summit on December 9th and 10th in Washington, D.C.  Join us in exploring the developing business models and user experience of attribute provider networks.