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

Thursday, 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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Applying Social Technologies – Part 3

Monday, 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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Gigya interviewed for latest Forrester report on the future of the social web

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Forrester’s Jeremiah Owyang released a new report today entitled The Future of the Social Web: Portable IDs Catalyze A Power Shift To Consumers.  The report describes how technologies that help users bring their identities with them across the web are transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM and advertising.  Owyang hypothesizes that the social web will enable consumers to base decisions on peers and empower them, together with their communities, to define product roadmaps.

The report interviews executives, product managers, and strategists at 24 companies: Appirio, Cisco Eos, Dell, Facebook, Federated Media Publishing, Flock, Gigya, Google (Open Social/stack team), Graphing Social Patterns (Dave McClure), IBM (SOA Team), Intel (social media marketing team), KickApps, LinkedIn, Meebo, Microsoft (Live team), MySpace, OpenID Foundation (Chris Messina), Plaxo, Pluck, Razorfish, ReadWriteWeb, salesforce.com, Six Apart, and Twitter.

Click here to read more about the report on Jeremiah’s blog or here to purchase a copy of the complete version.

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Gigya Socialize Markup Language (GSML) released to offer shortcuts for integration

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Gigya recently launched Gigya Socialize Markup Language (GSML), which offers developers a set of custom XHTML tags used for rendering user information and UI components in Gigya Socialize enabled sites.  GSML makes the integration of Gigya Socialize quick and easy by embedding HTML-like syntax and tags into your HTML pages.  Sample GSML tags include: connectButtons, friendSelector, loginButtons, name, and photo.

Check out wiki.gigya.com to learn more.

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New features and destination sites added to Wildfire

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Now available:

  • The option to post a widget directly to the Facebook newsfeed rather than to a Facebook profile page
  • The ability to add  custom destination buttons to the Wildfire share menu on your site
  • Automatic display of the social network to which a user last posted as the first choice on a subsequent widget grab
  • The option to display both post and bookmarking destinations in Wildfire’s default interface, rather than on separate tabs
  • The option for a user to select where to post a widget if they have more than one blog on WordPress or Blogger
  • Improved support for posting to WordPress
  • The creation of a new onCopy event when the “copy code” button is clicked in Wildfire
  • An expanded list of social bookmarking destinations including Eons and Buzzup

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Executives from Gigya, Digital Media’s Leading Social Applications & Technologies Company, Speaking at some of the Most Respected Digital Events, Q2 2009

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

Gigya executives will appear on stage at four key conferences in the next three weeks.

On April 22, 2009, Ben Pashman, Gigya’s VP, Sales and Business Development, will participate at Ad: Tech in San Francisco, on the panel “The Next Frontier: Advertising in Applications,” with executives from Marvel Entertainment and Coca-Cola among other leaders in portable application advertising. The panel features a discussion how application advertising is evolving and how leading marketers are driving results through their distributed content initaitives. Ben will share case studies from Gigya and its clients.

Hot on the heels of being named one of AlwaysOn’s 2009 OnHollywood 100, April 29, 2009, Gigya is participating at OnHollywood in Los Angeles, CA. Gigya CEO Dave Yovanno will speak on the panel, “Leveraging Social Media: How can social media be used to market and share entertainment content profitability?” Mr. Yovanno will focus on how Gigya’s social technologies can help Hollywood promote and monetize their considerable assets on social networks–part of this year’s OnHollywood theme.

On May 5, 2009, Ben will appear at Digital Hollywood in Santa Monica, California. His panel, “Widgets as a Platform: Content, Advertising, Communications,” will feature leaders from the world of advertising widgets and will address the widget economy. Widgets are fast becoming everyone’s favorite interactive advertising tool for reaching audiences on social networks. Ben will share insights into how brands can leverage social widgets to become part of the conversations happening in social environments.

Finishing off his whirlwind conference tour, Ben will appear at the IMC (Internet Marketing Conference), May 12, 2009, in San Francisco, CA. For one day, the IMC brings together a select group of thought-leaders in interactive advertising. This year the conference focuses on the popularity and rise of social networks and the resulting new opportunities for online advertising as well as latest developments in discrete areas such as social widgets. Ben is contributing to the panel, “Developments in Social Advertising,” and will address how Gigya is innovating solutions for delivering engagement and scale for brands on Facebook and MySpace.

Click here to read more.

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Why “Social Authentication” Will Triumph Over OpenID

Friday, January 9th, 2009

Since the dawn of the Internet, the universal cry of pain has been “whycan’t I log in to all sites with one password?.”  The goal of universal identify is one that makes so much sense,
but that has been difficult to achieve because it requires the cooperation of so many.

Both corporations and nonprofits have tried to have a go at this holy grail. From Microsoft’s Passport to the recent OpenID initiative. These approaches have seen moderate adoption so far, and when I consider why, what I get is – not enough value. When you want to sign up for a site, these authentication services simply save you the need to fill one field — the password.

Social Authentication, on the other hand, is a real revolution. A typical registration form has 4-5 fields with maybe another 4-5 optional fields. Social Authentication, namely the ability to use your social network account universally, will typically save you from filling in all of these fields – this is what I call a value proposition.

But wait! There’s more! With this one click approval, the site owner gets access to tens of other, highly updated, data points about the user. You get an API with access to the user’s media resources and the social graph of the user. And last but not least, the site publisher has 2 ways of communicating with the user and that user’s friends’ – a messages/notifications API and an API for sending actions to the newsfeed.

Early adopters of social authentication report a 50% increase in registrations – that’s many more users, each providing much more information.

OpenId doesn’t stand a chance. Long live Social Authentication! Now we just need a better name for it. Ideas anyone?

P.S. try this neat mouse movement password recorder and log in example.

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Gigya’s Sales Team Annual Meeting & Holiday Celebration

Thursday, December 18th, 2008

On Monday we got our sales folks from all around the country into the Palo Alto headquarters for our annual sales team meeting.  The full day event was packed with updates from the marketing and business development teams, exercises and brainstorming.

Selling innovative social marketing solutions is exciting and challenging, and so it was a good opportunity to update everyone on all the new stuff we released lately (Social Widgets rock) and on stuff we have in the pipeline (lots of it – the social web must move forward even in a recession).

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Since sales was already in Palo Alto, we got everyone together for our first annual holiday celebration – dinner & bocce! This was excluding our dev team in Tel Aviv who will be bowling for Hanukkah next Sunday instead…

Before drinks:

Party1

and after…..

Patry2

Happy Holidays!

Eyal

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