test cc's Profile

We've shipped a prototype implementation of the emerging OAuth WRAP specification on FriendFeed. If you're a developer working with RESTful APIs, you'll want to check this out!

OAuth is a technology that can be thought of as a user's "valet key" for the Web. Just as you don't share your Facebook password with applications built on Connect or Platform, OAuth provides the same sort of functionality but in a standard way that can also be used by developers anywhere. In the end, we're trying to make it simpler not just for developers building on our APIs, but for everyone building with OAuth.

While Facebook Connect and our APIs do not use OAuth today, we've been working over the past month to share what we've learned with the broader community and shape both the new OAuth WRAP specification and OAuth's IETF standardization effort. We plan to continue developing OAuth WRAP within the community and incorporate it directly into Facebook Connect next year.

Last month, we joined Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! in announcing our commitment to technologies like OAuth being free to implement by anyone anywhere. Following this announcement we hosted a small summit to go over the current state of the OAuth WRAP specification and start to define a way to make use of OAuth WRAP directly from within JavaScript, like you do today with Facebook Connect. Check out Brian Eaton's notes from the summit.

Luke Shepard, an engineer on our platform engineering team, wrote a draft JavaScript profile for OAuth WRAP. Thanks to Bret Taylor and the FriendFeed team, FriendFeed now has an OAuth WRAP provider prototype.

FriendFeed offers OAuth WRAP these endpoints:

Why Do You Need to Verify a Signature?

When Facebook sends you information about a user, your server needs to know that it is actually coming from Facebook. If you send a request to Facebook and receive a response, then you know that it comes from the right person because you know who you asked. But if a request comes in unsolicited, then you need to be able to authenticate that the user ID is actually coming from Facebook servers. Otherwise, some random Joe on the internet could send a request claiming to be user ID 2901279, and you would send data about that user.

The key to verification is the application secret. There are only two parties that know the secret: your application server, and Facebook. Whenever Facebook sends data to your server, it includes a signature that is encoded using your application secret. You can perform the same encoding, and check the signature to make sure it matches. Random Joe can't generate that signature because he doesn't know your secret key.

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Welcome to Scrapy

Scrapy is a fast high-level screen scraping and web crawling
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