What could be the best thing you could do to make sure your product or initiatives are a success? A testing ground for sure and Facebook appears to have one which it acquired some time earlier: FriendFeed. It appears that the social network found more purposes other than just using its immense talent to its advantage.
What Facebook is doing is testing its OAuth WRAP feature on FriendFeed and all this would actually have a lot of feedback coming from users out there, primarily the developers before it actually plans to implement it across Facebook. WRAP is a bit different from the regular OAuth in a manner that it puts away the use of the long signatures. This means that you don’t need to remember the much disliked secrets and signatures. In my opinion WRAP is al about taking OAuth to the next level by removing the complexity involved in using OAuth for developers. Plus it adds to another step that giants like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook are taking initiatives to simplify the open standard.
Facebook itself doesn’t use OAuth for accessing services and apps on its platform but it might very well have this next year. And this might actually come out much sooner given that the developers will be able to test drive WRAP and figure a better and easier way to create OAuth and integrate it with APIs which might very well be build using it. The initiative symbolizes Facebook openness to stepping towards a much open standard, the signs of which occurred first when the social network gave developers a chance by opening Tornado, FriendFeed’s tech platform.
Those are just Facebook specific updates towards a more open standard. We had earlier talked about Facebook heading toward becoming more Twitter with the provision of status update syndication on Facebook with Twitter.
