On March 13, in adhering to our goals of making powerful consumer directed identity standards such as OpenID, OpenID Hybrid and OAuth consumer friendly, Janrain participated on a panel that discussed healthy trade-offs between usability, privacy and security for online consumers adopting third party authentication. The panel was part of the 2012 NSTIC/IDTrust Workshop, that featured presentations and panel discussions by leading identity management and standards experts who addressed a wide range of topics that surround identifying and implementing the four NSTIC Guiding Principles in the Identity Ecosystem, including:

• Identity Solutions will be Privacy-Enhancing and Voluntary
• Identity Solutions will be Secure and Resilient
• Identity Solutions will be Interoperable
• Identity Solutions will be Cost-Effective and Easy To Use

One of key takeaways was that Identity Ecosystems need to be designed with user experience in mind, which is more than picking the correct font size or layout. Transparency around how a user’s data will be used by a website or organization needs to be front and center on a registration page rather than be buried deeply in a Terms of Use policy.

The good news is that, in order to achieve disclosure and transparency online, organizations do not need to reinvent the wheel.  Social networking providers such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google and others have pioneered disclosure through the use of end-user permission screens requesting lawful transfer of their data to 3rd party websites. Brands and organizations need to look no further than to embrace best practices for the benefit of their end users.

Tune in to the engaging conversation here or hit play below.

1. Data structure intensive. The fundamental concept in social networking is the network. There are many ways to represent networks, including graphs, hypergraphs, and simplicial sets. Functional programming provides elegant ways to define and manipulate such libraries, and extensive libraries to assist the programmer in this area. Furthermore, both Haskell and Scala offer support for generic programming, wherein social network operations can often be defined once and reused for many relevant data structures.
2. Concurrency: The services must be able to process many requests in parallel, and processing each request requires many activities that may be done in parallel, such as accessing a database, and contacting social network service providers. As a request is processed, the server may access or construct data structures; for example the server may construct a network of friends and friends of friends from several service providers. Another example is the processing of OpenID discovery for social login. OpenID discovery involves a sequence of discovery steps to different endpoints on the web. Many of these steps can be carried out in parallel. Haskell offers lightweight threads in support of concurrent programming, while Scala offers actors in support of concurrency. Concurrency and data structures are easy to combine in either Haskell or Scala. A sample that forks a thread for each element of a list in Haskell is shown below. Similar combinators can be defined for graphs and other data structures.
3. High Availability: The services for the social network need to operate 24/7 in a highly available manner. Functional programming offers several features that support high availability. Scala has Finagle, which is an RPC system. Finagle can be used to implement availability concepts such as failover or m of n policies. Code should also be tolerant of errors. For example, in the code snippet below, each individual request could fail. The code returns a list of responses for those requests that succeed, and error codes for those that failed. The processing of the requests and responses will continue in spite of some failing requests. Thus the code snippet includes data structures, concurrency, and fault tolerance in just two lines of code.

– | Sample Haskell code that combines data structures and concurrency.
– | Do proxy HTTP over a list of requests
proxyHTTPs::HostPort                 – ^ The host/port of the dest
          -> [ Request B.ByteString ] – ^ HTTP Requests to send
          ->IO [ EitherSomeException ( ResponseB.ByteString ) ]
proxyHTTPs hp reqs = do
 – Perform each request in parallel.
 rsps  <- mapM ( proxyHTTPWrap hp ) reqs
 – Get the response data out of the MVars.
 mapM takeMVar rsps

At Janrain have found functional programming to be an important tool in support of social networking applications. We will continue to explore this valuable technology in support of social applications.

With a commitment to promoting interoperability and enabling technologies, the OpenID Foundation has made a dedicated effort in 2011 to increase international participation and broaden the discussion on the latest use cases, technologies and policies within the global identity ecosystem.

Janrain talked about the evolution of OpenID and consumer use cases. With OpenID technologies now mainstream and serving as an enabling component within the application, identity takes a central role in powering and protecting the consumer experience.

The conference continues the momentum for launching OpenID Connect as a new standard that leverages the early learnings of OpenID, the identity ecosystem and how users want to participate. Standardizing and innovating around OpenID Connect will open up new use cases around attribute exchange which can further enhance the consumer experience by providing more access, control and trust.

The content and preparation for this event was exceptional and we thank the OpenID Foundation Japan for hosting the event and our colleagues at Google and Microsoft for their roles in sponsoring.

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts by Kevin Long, Janrain Technical Product Manager, to introduce the new Janrain Engage social login widget and provide detail on how to use the new enhancements. Read other posts within the Janrain Technical series.

Previous posts covered the expanded support for mobile devices, new customization features, and performance. Today we’ll focus on using the client side javascript api and how to connect it to analytics engines.

The Event of the Season!

Analytics Integration with the Social Login Widget

Janrain Engage analytics provide a lot of insight and value with the hand dashboard trend graph, summaries and the click to drill in headings that reveal the details. If you are already tracking your website’s visitor traffic with an analytics tool like Google Analytics, or Omniture SiteCatalyst you will want to view the user login process right along side your existing analytics data.

The Janrain Engage social login widget’s client side JavaScript API fires events that you can listen to and trigger your own client side code. You can track these events using a product like Google Analytics or Omniture, or even your own in house analytics.

How to Track User Login Events

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.  

As a senior software architect, Allen Tom will be working to make Internet identity portable, interoperable and secure. Prior to joining Janrain, Tom was the principal architect and security lead for Yahoo’s Membership Platform, and was responsible for Yahoo’s user account management, single sign on, and API authorization services. Tom is active in the OpenID community and was elected by the community to serve as a director of the OpenID Foundation. Prior to joining Yahoo, Tom was a principal engineer at AOL, working on AOL Music and AOL shopping, and worked on LDAP as a senior software engineer at Netscape.

“Internet identity is rapidly evolving and is currently undergoing incredible innovation and disruption, said Allen Tom, software architect. “I joined the Janrain team because the company has always been at the forefront, leading the way with open identity standards, and enabling users to have choices in how they identify themselves online.”

“Allen will help Janrain continue to advance our platform of user management offerings,” said Larry Drebes, CEO of Janrain. “We are thrilled to have him join the team, and look forward to his input on our product portfolio.”

Janrain has a long history of driving the identity space forward through championing key protocols such as OpenID and OAuth. The addition of Allen to our existing team of experts only further strengthens our ability to bridge the gap between users, identity providers, brand sites, and developers to make the next generation of Internet identity a reality with its user management platform.

Whether you are a Kindle enthusiast or not, it is easy to see that the price will be very appealing to those unwilling or unable to shell out $500 or more for an iPad. While not seen as a heads on threat to Apple, Amazon is likely to capitalize on some niche market segments, like college students. For app developers and marketers alike, Android’s ongoing growth and additions of new devices further cements the importance of building apps for the platform.

Continuing Janrain’s commitment to provide key mobile capabilities that align with trends in the marketplace, we are pleased to announce the release of several key enhancements to our Android SDK, including:

• Optimized for all Android tablets such as the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Xoom, or Kindle Fire (supports Android v1.6 – 3.2)
• Additional integration flexibility in publishing UI – supporting embedded and overlay modes
• New login option including the ability to select identity providers at app runtime. So, for example, if you need to re-authenticate to confirm a purchase, you can provide a different set of providers for checkout than you did to enable commenting or reviews in the content portion of your app.
• Improved application download times by decreasing SDK file size by 50%
• Increased data transfer speed by ~2X
• Better network reliability through changes to connection type

You can download the SDK on Janrain’s GitHub site or find more information on the enhancements and bugs fixed in our Android documentation.

As always we want to hear about what you are doing in mobile and what we can do to make it easier for you to engage with your customers.

During the keynote, X.commerce announced the launch of its commerce identity platform PayPal Access.  PayPal Access opens the door to increased personalization and a streamlined checkout as consumers can use their PayPal account to login to 3rd party sites.  This provides additional convenience for mobile shoppers where it reduces the need to type your shipping and billing addresses.  Janrain announced yesterday that any website can now offer its users PayPal Access via Janrain Engage.  Janrain has worked closely with PayPal on a tight integration that enables merchants to quickly install PayPal Access while also providing the tools to fine tune what personal data is requested from shoppers.

eBay has been aggressive in its acquisitions this past year, with Magento, GSI Commerce, Zong and Milo taking on new roles as X.commerce looks to build the full commerce stack.  While Magento has been open from the beginning, Milo announced a new API Wednesday that opens up their real-time pricing and local product availability to 3rd party platforms.  Commerce sites offering value-added services like local product availability are better positioned to get shoppers to login upfront with tools like PayPal Access if the benefit is a more personalized shopping experience.

Quick chat with Tim Domke of X.commerce about Janrain’s partnership and the new, improved integration with PayPal.

Looking forward to more from X.commerce as Innovate opens for day 2. Stop by and see us if you’re here.

One of my favorite talks was by Digant Kasundra from Stanford University. He went over the “Puppet is great and here is why”, like most people, but then went on to include pitfalls and how they learned what not to do with Puppet and why. He also explained Classes vs. Defined Types, along with why they seem interchangeable but should be used for very different things. You can find a bit of this and other knowledge from him in one of the Puppet Best Practices documents.

During the course of the two days I had the pleasure to meet a few of the actual PuppetLabs engineers who were very friendly and helpful with questions about their software. One in particular was around all the changes coming in 2.8 and how we at Janrain can better prepare for the coming upgrade was very insightful. One of the many changes coming in 2.8 means that dynamic variable look-ups are being deprecated, and we’re now to use fully-qualified variable names. One of the PuppetLabs guys took the extra step to point me in the right direction, and now our Puppet logs are in great shape.

Over all it was a great experience to rub elbows with other people in the Puppet community. I love my job here at Janrain, and this conference made me love Puppet too. When I started at Janrain, I had very little exposure to Puppet and it’s Ruby-ish looking code. Five months later with much help from Janrain Operations “Puppet guru” James Loope, and two days at PuppetConf, I get it.

Puppet allows us the peace of mind to keep things automated and consistent across our whole infrastructure. It’s also nice to have the ability to provision new instances in minutes and scale if needed on a moments notice.

Thanks to all the people that made this conference happen and run so smoothly – hope to see you all next year.