Twitter @anywhere, OpenID, OAuth, and Digg's support of Open Standards
As you may have heard, Twitter announced on Monday a new set of frameworks named @anywhere. @anywhere makes it easier for site owners to have rich integrations with Twitter without having to visit twitter.com. Digg is looking forward to supporting @anywhere in our upcoming release.
But that's not all we've been up to on the third party integration front. Before we started down the path of re-writing our infrastructure last fall, we decided to take a fresh look at our login and registration options. Our Facebook Connect integration last May was a great success, resulting in greater user engagement and an average registration increase of 20-30%. Since we had always planned to support more services, we did a survey to see what services the Digg community were already using. Nearly 14 thousand users responded, of which over 80% were registered Digg users. Here are the survey results that influenced our decision:
We chose to feature the top four services in our upcoming login re-design: Google (87.9%), Facebook (75.5%), Yahoo! (51.9%), and Twitter (51.1%), as well as our previously announced support of OpenID. Here's a sneak peek at our new unified login and registration dialog:
The good news is that some of these platforms are based on open standards: Google and Yahoo! are both OpenID based platforms, but also support OAuth for deeper integrations. Twitter's platform is based on OAuth. Further, since MySpace, AOL, and myOpenID are also OpenID based, you can still use those services.
More good news is that there is a growing number of users opting to use existing accounts when signing up for websites, rather than creating new ones. JanRain, a major OpenID provider, reported recently that as many as 89% of users are now opting for existing accounts over creating new ones.
Digg is committed to supporting open standards. Our writable API is OAuth based. We also try to open source any libraries that we build in house. The API and our login re-design have resulted in us releasing three open source libraries: OpenID (relying party support, it powers our Google, Yahoo!, and OpenID integration), HTTP_OAuth (consumer and provider support, this powers our API and some of our Twitter integration), and Services_Facebook (which powers our Facebook Connect integration).
If you like working in an environment that fosters open standards and affects millions of people around the world, consider checking out our jobs page.
Cheers,