Hey pals, We don´t have to take literally the "Open" from OpenSocial. I believe that is important to respect the privacy concerns and your approach sounds nice to me and very reasonable. Also, considering the Social class, I guess the viewer/owner are still unclear. In the Twitter application (http://estradacms.com/opensocial/twitter.xml) when I accessed my profile I get my data from twitter. So I tried to access the Twitter from a friend's profile and again I get my data. =)
Cheers, Robson Eisinger. On 11/4/07, Fabricio Zuardi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hello all, > > I have a question about something that doesn't seems covered by the > current version of the API (0.5) or at least not part of the online > documentation. > > Since this api as far as I understand is a work in progress, and since > this is an *open* api, it is natural to expect that improvements > suggested by the community, after some discussions and an agreement > can land into future revisions before we reach a good stable version > that can be frozen (1.0 maybe). > > I believe that this mailing list is (or if not, should be) the > main/authoritative place to discuss API improvements and decisions, as > open as possible, following the good path of other standardization > efforts in the open source community. So I will prefix this types of > request with "API Council" in the subject to make filtering easy, I > don't think we need another list for that just yet :) > > Enough talking, my first rant: anonymous or unlogged viewers. What > should we expect from a container? Is this something we want > OpenSocial API to cover? And if so, how? > > Context > -------------------------- > For big profile-centric social networks today, like Myspace, Facebook, > Orkut, Friendster, etc that are closed, and/or invitation-only, due to > the nature of this business and privacy concerns, an account and being > logged-in is required in order to view anything, so it is fair to > assume that a gadget/app placed on someone's profile page will always > have as the Viewer a known member of that network, so the current > available checks isOwner and isViewer covers everything. > > However, other more public accessible and not so profile-centric > social networks like Flickr, Deviant Art, Last.fm, LinkedIn to some > degree and public networks built on top of the Ning platform, not > necessarily requires login to access and view user pages, and so, > application developers needs to know what to expect from the api under > this circumstances, otherwise it will have to test on every network to > see how that particular container have implemented the "anonymous > viewer" case and make lots of checks in his code to be able to work > cross-networks. And we don't want that. > > Use case > ------------------------ > * I am an application developer and want to display the list of > friends of the viewer in my application following the example of the > Developer's Guide at > http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/javascript/index.html > > * I also want to prepare my code to behave different in case the > viewer doesn't have an account on that network, be it to display a > message "sorry, but you need to be a member", or to fallback and show > the owner's friends list for unlogged users. > > * Since there is not a clearly defined method to check if the viewer > is logged, or an standard expected value for the > newFetchPersonRequest, I have to go and test on all containers one by > one and adapt my code for the different ways containers might treat > unlogged users, for example, Ning as of today returns a Person of name > 'Anonymous' and id 'xn_anonymous'. I am pretty sure this is not a > standardized value because XN is a ning namespace, not a documented > return value ;) > > > Proposal > ---------------------- > - Add a new method to the Person class > http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/docs/javascript/reference/opensocial.Person.html > : > Boolean isLoggedIn() > > - The anonymous user would still be a Person instance, which means > that a dataResponse.get('viewer').getData(); would return an object > and not false or null, the reasoning for that is that an anonymous > user is still a person (jokes aside) and it might as well have a name > like "Anonymous Coward" on slashdot, a generic avatar, and an id that > is different depending on the network. > > - this is different than just checking if the list of friends is > empty, because an app developer might want different behaviors for a > registered user with zero friends and an unlogged user. > > > > What do you guys think? Does that make sense? Is this approach > reasonable? I would love to hear your toughts on that. > > > -- > Fabricio C Zuardi > http://cchits.org > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "OpenSocial Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/opensocial-api?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
