Google, MySpace, Yahoo Forge OpenSocial Foundation

Google, MySpace, and Yahoo announced they have agreed to form a non-profit
group that would govern the development of a standard application
programming interface that developers could use in building software for
supporting online social networks. The three Internet companies expected
the OpenSocial Foundation to launch in 90 days, and asked for others in
the industry to rally behind the OpenSocial API, which was developed by
Google to foster development across emerging social-network development
platforms. MySpace, which accounted for three-quarters of the Web traffic
to social networks in the U.S. in 2007, and its second-place rival Facebook
have been opening up their platforms to third-party developers in an attempt
to add services that may attract advertisers and keep subscribers on the
sites longer. While Facebook is offering its own proprietary tools,
MySpace and other social networks, including Google's Orkut, Hi5, Friendster,
Imeem, LinkedIn, and Plaxo, have agreed to adopt the OpenSocial API, which
connects to Web apps built in JavaScript and HTML. Google, MySpace and
Yahoo have agreed to contribute technology to the OpenSocial Foundation
under a "non assertion covenant," which means they won't seek to enforce
any patents on the intellectual property, representatives told reporters
during a teleconference. All companies joining the foundation would be
expected to contribute technology under the Creative Commons copyright
license. The companies will continue to work together and with the
OpenSocial community to further advance the specification through the new
foundation, as well as an open source reference implementation called
Shindig. Shindig is a new project in the Apache Software Foundation
incubator and is an open source implementation of the OpenSocial
specification and gadgets specification. The architectural components of
Shindig are: (1) Gadget Container JavaScript: core JavaScript foundation
for general gadget functionality; this JavaScript manages security,
communication, UI layout, and feature extensions, such as the OpenSocial
API; (2) Gadget Server: an open source version of Google's gmodules.com,
which is used to render the gadget XML into JavaScript and HTML for the
container to expose via the container JavaScript; (3) OpenSocial Container
JavaScript: JavaScript environment that sits on top of the Gadget
Container JavaScript and provides OpenSocial specific functionality --
profiles, friends, activities, datastore; (4) OpenSocial Gateway Server:
an implementation of the server interface to container-specific
information, including the OpenSocial REST APIs, with clear extension
points so others can connect it to their own backends. See the announcement Click Here

Google, NTT and the US GSA Deploy SAML 2.0 for Digital Identity Management

Liberty Alliance, the global identity consortium working to build a more
trusted internet for consumers, governments and businesses worldwide,
today released highlights of SAML 2.0-based digital identity management
applications that are delivering real world value to users and
organizations around the globe. These applications are among the many
public and private sector deployments helping to drive a more secure and
privacy-respecting internet identity layer across applications, sectors
and regions based on SAML 2.0 standards. With government organizations in
The Americas, Asia, Australia and Europe building and deploying SAML
2.0-based identity applications, SAML 2.0 has become the standard of
choice in the global eGovernment and public sectors. These governments
are relying on SAML 2.0 to deliver a wide variety of new online services
to citizens, help meet compliance mandates and to provide business and
trading partners with a secure and trusted platform for conducting
identity related transactions. A digital map and description of global
eGovernment deployments based on SAML 2.0 Liberty Federation is available...
Using SAML 2.0 allows Google's customers to treat web-based authentication
to Google Apps the same way they treat authentication to their other
services... NTT has developed SASSO, a personal Identity Provider that
enables users to single-sign-on to a PC and leverage the strong
authentication capabilities of the mobile phone to conduct a wide range
of secure identity-based transactions. SASSO uses the increasingly
ubiquitous mobile phone as an Identity Provider (IdP) to allow users to
access a Service Provider (SP). Once authenticated by their own mobile
phone, the IdP on the mobile phone issues a SAML assertion signed by a
private key and sends that assertion to SPs.