On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 13:33 +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote: > During the development of Ubuntu Karmic, I discussed with some people > about having social services accounts (facebook, twitter, etc) > configured in one place, about-me specifically. Since it was a bit late > for GNOME 2.28, I postponed the discussion, but now that 2.28.0 is > almost out, I'd like to start it here. > > So, the idea is to have a central place where all those accounts are > configured, so that applications using those services (gwibber for now, > not sure if there are some others?) can just use that instead of having > to ask the user in every application his/her credentials for those > social services. Storing a username and password, or even just a username, isn't that useful any more: MySpace, Facebook and Flickr don't allow programmatic login with a username at all, and instead do a web-based authentication which gives the application a session key. Whilst Twitter currently does allow username/password they'll be phasing that out with the migration to OAuth. Some services such as jaiku/qaiku use "api keys" which are actually just random 128-bit integers the user copies and pastes from the web site into their desktop application. In Moblin we're using gnome-keyring to store session token and secrets for services which use them (with the server and and API key as the attributes). We have a web services UI which lets people login to their service and then stores the resulting API key in the keyring for the application to use at a future point. The big problem of this approach is that when you login you effectively authenticate *an application* to access your account and not a generic login, so whilst this works well for us (we have a Moblin key and at the moment the web services integration is centralised into Mojito) this isn't a general solution (and probably violates every service's terms). http://www.wafaa.eu/index.php?/archives/206-Guide-To-Goblin-Part-2.html is a visual guide to the web service settings in Goblin (although now Twitter uses the Login button approach). We're looking at extending this in the future so that you can login to multiple applications for each service from one UI, but at this point the UI starts to look a bit pants... Something like this wouldn't be unusual: Flickr - Postr [login] - F-Spot [login] - Mojito [login] Twitter - Mojito [login] - Gwibber [login] Last.fm - Mojito [login] - Rhythmbox [login] Anyway, if anyone wants to see what we're doing to solve this, have a look at the mojito (social data aggregator) and bisho (web services settings UI) modules on git.moblin.org. Ross -- Ross Burton mail: ross burtonini com jabber: ross burtonini com www: http://burtonini.com
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