Social Service Beta now available in Adobe Flash Platform Services, powered by Gigya

October 29th, 2009

As promised, we’re letting the Gigya community know that Adobe’s Social Service Beta, part of the new Adobe Flash Platform Services suite,  is available as of today.  Here’s how Adobe describes the new product:

“The Social service enables you to write applications that integrate leading social networks such as Facebook and MySpace into your apps.  The service, implemented through an easy to use API, provides an abstraction layer that connects with different networks. This removes the complexity and repetitive work of having to implement multiple APIs in order to integrate social features from multiple social networks into your application. The service also insulates developers against underlying social network changes;  as the underlying APIs at the supported social networks change, the service adapts to those changes so you don’t have to rush updated versions of your app to market. Additional social networks will become available in the future and will work with existing applications with little additional development effort. The capabilities in the Social service are powered by Gigya.”

This new service, now integrated with Adobe’s authoring tools,  is powered by Gigya’s social service, the same service used by ABC.com, TNT.com, NBC Universal, and more thand 2500 others.

You can download the Social Service Library and access forums at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/social/

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Adobe Flash Platform Services Unveiled – Powered by Gigya

October 14th, 2009

Adobe unveiled its new Flash Platform Services at the Adobe MAX conference last week, featuring the Gigya-powered services in the keynotes on both Monday and Tuesday.  Adobe Flash Platform Services are online, hosted services that allow developers to add innovative capabilities to Web applications with a predictable, cost efficient deployment model.  Developers, advertisers and publishers are now using Adobe Flash Platform Services to make Web applications sharable, social, and collaborative.

It was amazing to see the enthusiastic response from the thousands of developers that filled every nook of the show, and our hats are off to the fantastic team at Adobe that worked so hard to bring this important product to market. In addition to the distribution services powered by Gigya, coming soon to Flash Platform Services are social services powered by Gigya, which enable simplified implementation and management of Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Sign in with Twitter,  Y!OS, though a single API.

You can learn more about how to access the services, available for Flash Pro, Flexbuilder 3 and Dreamweaver at http://www.adobe.com/flashplatform/services/


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Gigya and Acquia host Webinar for new Gigya Socialize Drupal Module – available now in archive

August 7th, 2009

A big thanks to our friends at Acquia, and Joshua Brauer in particular, for putting on such a quality webinar earlier this week. The webinar was very well attended and folks asked some great questions, the answers to which are being posted together with the webinar. If you missed the live event, it is available for anyone to view right now.

For those who may be unfamiliar, Gigya Socialize makes it easy to integrate your site with social sites and OpenID providers like Facebook Connect, Twitter, MySpace and more.  Gigya provides single, simplified API access to all authentication and social APIs from these providers to streamline implementation and management.

The Drupal module for Gigya Socialize delivers all the features and functionality of the core Socialize product, from authentication, to customization & personalization, to promotion, but also provides some very powerful features specific to the Drupal CMS.

Gigya’s new Socialize Module for Drupal makes it easy for Drupal site owners to:

  • Enable users to link existing accounts with social network and OpenID identities, and personalize the user experience by making it easy for sites to integrate user profile and social graph data.
  • Increase user acquisition by enabling users to invite friends to the site, or to share site content or a specific event. For example, using the Socialize module users can choose to invite their Facebook friends to comment on a new post they created.
  • Increase site traffic through viral promotion, enabling users to send status updates, tweets and newsfeed events to their social networks. The Gigya Socialize module has been fully integrated with Drupal’s user action and trigger core modules so Drupal site owners can configure the viral promotion channels to work dynamically.
  • Easily configure the user experience, design, and module functionality using the Drupal administration panel.

“Content and community are the critical components of many Drupal websites and the Gigya Socialize Drupal module connects Drupal-based communities with the leading social networks on the web,” said Dries Buytaert, Drupal project founder and Acquia CTO.  “Simplifying site authentication processes and integration with various networks and platforms can improve the user experience and extend the reach of every website.”

The new Gigya Socialize Drupal module is fully configurable and installs in minutes with no programming. The module is available, free of charge, on Drupal.org at http://drupal.org/project/gigya.
Please check it out and let us know what you think or if you have questions. We can be reached at support@gigya-inc.com.

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Applying Social Technologies – Part 3

July 20th, 2009

- Continued from 7/13/09

TECHNOLOGIES SIMPLIFIED

The services offered by social networks and web mail platforms are in many cases built on top of technology standards.  These standards include OpenID and OAuth.

OpenID is an open decentralized standard for user authentication and access control.  Publishers who accept OpenID allow users to login with that consistent digital identity.  Sites or companies that provide OpenIDs allow users to take their credentials from these sites and use them to login to other sites.  Providers include AOL, Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, PayPal and Yahoo, among others.  There are over 27,000 sites that accept credentials from OpenID providers for login and registration purposes.

Publishers integrating OAuth can authenticate users in a way similar way to that of OpenID.  OAuth is different however, because it also gives publishers a session key that enables those publishers to access profile and social graph data.

Companies providing social technologies through their APIs adhere to these standards.  The chart below outlines which standards these social APIs are using.

The Facebook platform and associated FBML (Facebook Markup Language) were built as a custom standard that functions in a similar way to a combination of Open ID and OAuth, but which does not actually use those standards and protocols.

IMPLEMENTATION CONSIDERATIONS AND CHALLENGES

There are 5 major challenges when implementing these social technologies.  They include:

1.    APIs lack universality:  Each API has different integration requirements and different core features.  For example, even though MySpace and Yahoo are OpenID providers, implementation for each is significantly different and requires new work for site developers.   Publishers who want to integrate multiple social APIs may require additional expertise and resources.

2.    Managing updates to APIs is time-consuming:  API providers make changes frequently, requiring sites using these APIs to make updates to their code each time a new version is released.

3.    New APIs continue to open up:  As additional social networks and identity providers open up, sites who want to give users choice will need to integrate them.   For example, Twitter and Yahoo made their APIs available in early 2009.  Publishers who want to give users choice will need ongoing technical support to integrate and manage new APIs.

4.    API providers do not offer dedicated support: API providers only offer self-service support.  While there are several resources for developers on each social networking site’s developers’ wiki, there are no in-person support services available.

5.    APIs can be integrated in different ways:  There is no single right way to integrate the APIs.  An initial integration could allow users to authenticate or login to their site using credentials from a social network.  A secondary integration step might be to enable users to invite friends to the site, or update their status while on the site.  In a deeper integration, sites could create activities like games, quizzes, polls, virtual chats or group viewing experiences.  The results of these activities can be published in newsfeeds to drive traffic back to the site.

Next week: GIGYA SOCIALIZE

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Turner Sports implements Gigya Socialize on NBA.com, NASCAR.com

July 15th, 2009

We recently published a case study on our Socialize implementation with Turner Sports for the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. The story was also covered by AdAge.  It was extremely rewarding to demonstrate the indisputable  value of providing users with not only social functionality, but with choice.

The Challenge: Engaging NBA Fans on TNT.tv Online
Sports fans are social. Whether they are watching a game at a stadium or a bar, fans chat about players and stats, high five each other and cheer together when the momentum swings. To bring these “real-world” activities online, Turner Sports implemented Gigya’s Socialize technology to make it easy for fans to engage with friends from the top three social networks while watching the NBA Eastern Conference Finals on TNT.tv.

The Approach: Driving Engagement, Viral Promotion through Social Activity
Using Gigya Socialize, Turner became the first TV network to take an agnostic approach, letting users sign into any or all of the top three social networks: MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

“We were going to allow the Facebook guy to chat with the MySpace guy to chat with the Twitter guy,” said Matthew Hong, VP-general manager of sports digital at Turner Sports.

Fan messages about the game drove engagement on the TNT.tv site, and were also published to the newsfeeds of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter users, effectively promoting the event real-time to their networks of friends and driving traffic back to TNT.com.

The Result: Demonstrable Fan Engagement
The results clearly demonstrate the value of making social features accessible to all users. According to Turner, “We were pleased with the better user experience and higher engagement. The early return is it gives people an opportunity to participate in our content.”

Distribution of Unique Users by Network
MySpace: 40%
Facebook: 48%
Twitter: 12%

Distribution of Messages by Network
MySpace: 53%
Facebook: 35%
Twitter: 12%

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Applying Social Technologies – Part 2

July 14th, 2009

Continued from 7/6/09

NEW SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES: WHAT THEY DO
Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn grew by creating opportunities for people to recreate their offline personal networks through online tools.  Now they are making those networks more widely available to publishers – through Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, and Sign in with Twitter  –  to enable users to register, connect and socialize on sites outside of the social networks.  These services allow publishers to authenticate users, to promote by publishing content and activity back to the social network the user belongs to,  to use profile data to enhance the site experience, and to tap into a user’s friend list (also called the social graph) to provide a more social experience.  These services are delivered via APIs, or application programming interfaces, which are sets of routines or data structures that allow publishers to get information from, and send data to, the social networks.

Authenticate
Sites now can enable users to login in one-click to using existing online identities.  When users login for the first time, sites can also invite users to register.   Facebook reports that sites using social APIs to authenticate users have seen as many as 2 out of 3 new registrants use their Facebook identity, and those users have about 50% more engagement on sites.

Promote
Sites can enable users to publish site content, and even their own activity, to the newsfeed or notification systems of their social network.  These communications reach a broad audience of that user’s friends and can drive traffic back to the publisher’s site.  For example, a user who takes a quiz can choose to share their results with friends by publishing them to their social network via a status update or newsfeed item.  Friends who see these newsfeed updates can then return to the site and take the quiz themselves.

Customize
 Once a user authenticates, publishers can access user data such as profile and friend information.  This information varies by provider, but includes everything from name and photo, to contact information like email address, or to deeper profile information such as interests, birthday, age, education.  Sites can use this information to customize the experience for each user.  For example, when a user authenticates, the publisher can get greet the user by name, suggest content based on interests, show ads based on age, and present content based on geography like local events or recently reviewed restaurants in their area.

Socialize
 Enabling users to socialize is to give them the ability to connect with friends in the context of your site’s content and activity. Publishers have found that showing what is “most popular” among a site’s community drives interaction.  Social APIs enable publishers to go one level deeper, for example displaying what is most popular on that site among a user’s friends, what those friends are saying via comments, or how those friends have voted in an online poll.

These are a few conceptual examples of the types of social implementations that are possible.  Let’s  take a look at a few case studies.

SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES IN ACTION:
Authenticate, Customize, Promote
Flixster was one of the first sites to add social functionality and to integrate MySpaceID.  Users who visit this popular movie reviews site can create a Flixster account using their MySpace username and password.  This step saves time for users who want to participate in a recognized way, for example by adding a review, but do not want to start the registration process from scratch.  When a user authenticates with MySpaceID they also allow Flixster to access their MySpace profile information.  This information is used by Flixster to recommend movies that are unique to each user.  For example, if a user has a reference to sports in their MySpace profile, then Flixster can recommend sports movies like Rudy or Hoosiers to watch or potentially review.

Authenticate, Socialize, Promote
One of the most successful implementations of these new social technologies was the use of Facebook Connect during the recent presidential election.   CNN enabled users watching the inauguration to authenticate on CNN.com via their Facebook account and update their status while watching the event.   These status updates were published to newsfeeds and other friends viewing these updates in real-time had an incentive to login to CNN.com and participate in the same live event.

Authenticate, Socialize, Promote
Ustream is an example of a site using Sign in with Twitter.  This implementation allows users to authenticate using Twitter credentials, but also to tweet (send a short message) about the video they are watching in real time.  Tweets not only appear on the site, but they also appear in the user’s Twitter feed, driving traffic back to the site.  In one example, users are watching the 2009 NHL playoff matchup between the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Carolina Hurricanes and tweeting about the hockey match.

Brand Sites Go Social
Publishers are not the only content owners who can take advantage of these social APIs.  Brands can also integrate these technologies to connect users to the brand and to each other.    Red Bull is an example of a brand that has incorporated social technologies in their web site.

Red Bull integrated Facebook Connect so fans could login to their landing page and comment on extreme sports articles.  In another example , users are discussing a news brief on Shaun White.  Once the user leaves a comment, that comment is published to the user’s newsfeed.

These examples demonstrate how publishers and brands can remove barriers for users to login to their sites and interact with other users.   On each platform, publisher sites benefitted from using these technologies.  The CNN.com integration, for example, yielded 2 million status updates at a rate of 4,000 updates per minute for an hour long speech .

Next week: Technologies Simplified

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Jeremiah Owyang on Gigya Socialize “Get Ready As Corporate Sites and Social Networks Start To Connect”

July 13th, 2009

In his blog post today, Jeremiah Owyang comments on the situation, opportunity, challenges and solutions for brands looking to make their web presence more social.

He says:  “In a recent report titled the “Future of the Social Web” we found that we are entering the era of social colonization, every webpage and experience will be social–even if brands choose not to participate.  I spent time with Palo Alto startup Gigya who now has a product that enables brands to quickly allow users to login using third party identities (like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook) quickly to a corporate web experience. Right now, brands are ‘Pollinating’ the social web by letting their corporate created content spread to social networks. As a result, companies are going to start aggregating conversations –the natural reaction to centralize trusted discussions.”

Jeremiah does a nice job of laying out a getting started plan for brands – while it will certainly take some new skill sets we at Gigya are trying to make it as easy as possible for brands to take advantage of powerful the new tools provided by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and others.

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Gigya Launches Socialize Plugin for Wordpress

July 7th, 2009

In our continued effort to make it easy for sites to add social and authentication features, we’ve recently launched a Socialize plug-in for WordPress.
The new Socialize plug-in enables WordPress sites to easily add multi-dimensional social and authentication functionality by providing a single point of access to Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Sign in with Twitter as well as OpenID providers like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail.
Features include:

  • Users can log into the site using their social network or webmail identity, enabling the Socialize plug-in to personalize the user experience by displaying the user’s name and image.
  • Users can update their status, promoting their activity to the newsfeeds of their social network, or invite specific social network friends with a custom message, driving traffic back to the original site.
  • Users can post comments on blog posts directly to their newsfeed on Facebook.
  • Users can share content or a specific event on the website.

Currently, plug-ins for both Wordpress and bbPress, WordPress’ forum software solution are available.  They are both fully configurable from the Wordpress administration panel, require little time to install, and require no programming knowledge.
Socialize’s code is also OpenSource, so developers can customize it as desired for their specific site needs.
The plug-in is available on Gigya’s website at http://www.gigya.com/public/Content/GS/Plugins.aspx or on Wordpress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/

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