social services as a desktop service?

[Rodrigo Moya]

Hi

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.

So, there are several things to discuss:

* is about-me the correct place for this?

* should we only provide configuration of social service accounts, or
does it make sense to have all web services accounts configured there
(social services + flickr + last.fm + IRC + IM + mail + etc etc)?

* should about-me (or wherever the code lands) just provide the accounts
configuration, or should it also provide access to their protocols (of
course, via a separate (dbus) service) so that any app can just use that
instead of implementing the protocol itself? I guess the protocol's
implementations can live in different places, like Empathy for IM, e-d-s
for mail, calendaring, and others, not just in one place, but at least
should there be an easy way for apps to access any of them?

anything else?

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[Ross Burton]

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@...
                                          jabber: ross@...
                                           www: http://burtonini.com


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[Bastien Nocera]

On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 13:34 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
<snip>
> 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.

Might be time for some cross-pollination and have some Moblin services
trickle back into GNOME itself.

Cheers

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[Ross Burton]

On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 14:54 +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 13:34 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> <snip>
> > 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.
>
> Might be time for some cross-pollination and have some Moblin services
> trickle back into GNOME itself.

Mojito itself has no dependencies other than librest (a layer on top of
libsoup) that are not part of GNOME already, so we totally welcome
people adding Mojito support to existing GNOME applications.  If anyone
has any ideas for social integration and would like some help in using
Mojito, just ping me.

Ross
--
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross@...
                                          jabber: ross@...
                                           www: http://burtonini.com


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