Flickr Services?!
That sly Ben Hammersley fellow is at it again. Apparently, Flickr has services which are accessible.
Mr. Hammersley is responsible for Linkr:
The current version of Linkr allows you to authenticate with your Flickr username and password, and then tells you all about the websites your Flickr contacts write.
I say current version because the code is in there to add in the thing I want it to do, namely to display the last x urls those sites themselves link to.
Other services include Connectr, Playr, and Reviewr.
There is some more stuff here. Single sign on and third-party authentication anyone? Read on…
Avi will want to look at this (PDF) to pick out the holes -- where does it fall down in comparison to his MISO suggestion for sign-ons?
While you're at it, Avi, I also found this recent Life with Alacrity post that mentioned SDSI:
To adopt his method for FOAF requires everyone to have a FOAF service script somewhere and not just a data file. But we've seen broad adoption of personal RSS and Trackback services, so I don't think this is a huge obstacle to overcome.
Just like I've been saying. Yes, I will run my own profile/authentication server. No problem. Folks without access to a server can get it from hosted sites, like those darn Flickr folks. Actually, Stewart et al at Ludicorp: please give us a GNE/Flickr script snippet written in PHP that we can put on our site.
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maybe we shud get it over with NOW
and ban all vowels from XML & URI ;0)
Jacob Martin asked what I mea
Jacob Martin asked what I meant by a code snippet:
Well, for starters, it should show my user picture and link to my Flickr profile, just like Technorati (see my front page for an example).
Ideally, it could also be used to generate a "face roll" (configurable to include the different levels of friendship).
Also, I want a snippet to include testimonials and/or a random testimonial.
Flickr vs. MISO
Boris,
You've hit it pretty much on the head - the way this differs from MISO is that MISO allows for anyone to host their own profile, whereas Flickr requires them to be centralized. In fact, it's even more restricted than that: all of the apps need to know the URL for the central authentication service, *and* the central service needs to know the URLs of all of the apps. So it's fine for a tightly connected group of services but it doesn't work as a distributed model.
The basic interaction is very similar, though (login page -> redirect to app -> background GET).
Avi
Hmmm...
Yes, I see what you mean. The fact that the central service needs to know the URL of the requesting app is no good -- the requesting app should be able to pass along the URL, and then Flickr responds to that URL.