Gmail Becomes an App Platform: Google Adds OAuth to IMAP

You may or may not be excited by the acronyms OAuth and IMAP/SMTP, but the combination of them all together is very exciting news. Google Code Labs announced this afternoon that it has just enabled 3rd party developers to securely access the contents of your email without ever asking you for your password. If you’re logged in to Gmail, you can give those apps permission with as little as one click.

What does that mean? It means mashups based on the actual emails in your inbox. If you’ve given a 3rd party app secure access to your Twitter account, then you’ll be familiar with the user experience. The first example out of the gate is a company called Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail. Backup service Backupify will announce tomorrow morning that it is leveraging the new technology to back up your Gmail account, as well.

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People are often wary about the idea of giving outside services access to their email, and well they should. OAuth is designed to make that safe to do. Combined with the IMAP/SMTP email retrieval protocols, it gives an app a way to ask Gmail for access to your information. Gmail pops up a little window and says “this other app wants us to give it your info – if you can prove to us that you are who they say you are (just give Gmail your password) – then we’ll go vouch for you and give them the info.” The 3rd party app never sees your password and can have its access revoked at any time. You can read more about OAuth, how it was developed and how it works, on the OAuth website.

Why is this so exciting? Because it means that the application we all spend so much time in, where so much of our communication goes on and where you can find some of our closest work and personal contacts – can now have value-added services built on top of it by a whole world of independent developers, without your having to give them your email password.

That’s the kind of thing that the data portability paradigm is all about. It’s the opposite of lock-in and seeks to allow users to take their data securely from site to site, u…

Posted via email from webbuzz by urban-listening

History Of Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

This infographic, by Flowtown, provides you with a humorous glimpse of how marketing has evolved over thousands of years. In fact, some of the olden days techniques are still being used today (e.g print ads).

The way marketers communicate messages to others depends heavily on the technologies that are invented. With that said, the past two centuries of technologies have rapidly changed the way marketers push their messages – radio, phones, television, Internet (some technologies aren’t highlighted in the infographic though).

Social media is of course the current “trending topic” in the field, but like any other medium, it would just be another day-to-day communication tool one day. How long would the social media hype last and what would be the next technology to revolutionize how marketers work?

Could location-based advertising be the answer?

via penn-olson.com

Posted via web from webbuzz by urban-listening

Improved chat for iGoogle and orkut

Sent to you via Google Reader

Have you ever wanted to quickly send a file to a friend who’s online? Now you can share pictures, documents and other files directly with your friends while chatting in iGoogle and orkut, without having to switch to email to send the file as an attachment. File transfer works directly in the browser so you don’t need to install anything. Just start a conversation with a friend and click “Send a file…” in the “Actions” menu. After you select a file, your friend will be asked if they want to accept the transfer. You can learn more on the Google Talkabout Blog.

You might have noticed that we recently gave iGoogle and orkut chat a face lift. Several tools now have a new home at the top of the chat window. From the new toolbar, you can click the blue camera and phone icons to start video and voice chats with your friends or the group chat icon to add additional friends to a text chat. If you’ve never used video or voice chat before, all you need is a webcam and microphone attached to your computer and a small plugin application available for free at www.google.com/chat/video.

We’re working to bring file transfer and the new toolbar to Gmail too. In the meantime, you can continue to access voice, video and group chat in Gmail from the “Video and More” menu in a chat window.

Posted by Bruce Leban, software engineer

Posted via email from webbuzz by urban-listening

Heise.de: Ende der offenen IT-Standards für Europa?

Ende der offenen IT-Standards für Europa?

Das zentrale Konzept offener IT-Standards im Rahmen des European Interoperability Framework (EIF) soll offenbar bis zur Bedeutungslosigkeit aufgeweicht werden. Das zumindest lässt der als “Release Candidate” bezeichnete aktuelle Entwurf des EIF 2 befürchten, der der Free Software Foundation Europe vorliegt.

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Auch nach massiven Protesten gegen einen im November durchgesickerten ersten Entwurf des EIF 2 gab es kaum signifikante Änderungen, wie die FSFE in ihrer Analyse zeigt. Zwar wurden einige besonders kritisierte Formulierungen entfernt, insgesamt sind die Ausführungen zu offenen Standards jedoch noch vager und unverbindlicher geworden. Die aktuelle Version 1 des European Interoperability Framework von 2004 setzte noch auf eine deutlich strengere Definition von offenen Standards.

Siehe dazu auch:

• Weichgespülte Standards für Europa, Hintergrundbericht zum aktuellen Release Candidate des EIF 2 samt Chronologie des European Interoperability Framework

(odi)

Copyright © 2009 Heise Zeitschriften Verlag

Posted via email from webbuzz by urban-listening

40 of the Most Useful Social Media and PR Blog Posts of Q1, 2010 (Jan – Mar)

Compiled by Adam Vincenzini 

Late last year, I published my picks for

the 99 most useful social media posts of 2009, a collection which was received really well.

This year, I’ve been publishing 10 of the best posts from around the web each week as part of the

’10 out of 10 in 2010′ series.

Now that

the first quarter of the year has been completed, I thought it was worth bringing together 40 of my favorites from 2010 (so far)…and, here they are…


The 40 Most Useful Social Media Posts of Q1, 2010

I’ve broken the collection into the following categories:

Tools, Social Networks, PR, Blogs / Blogging, Content, and General / Other.

Tools
1. The ULTIMATE list of 29 top tools for competitive intelligence
2. The 39 Tools I (Jay Baer) Will Use Today
3. 11 free tools for social media optimization
4. 5 online tools making social media easier in 2010
5. 10 essential design tools for social media pros
6. The one-stop social media toolkit shop
7. The top 10 re-tweet measurement tools
8. 9 tools that will help you livestream your newsroom
9. A list of social media management systems
10. 20 Free Social Media Tools To Help Find Your Brand’s Social Media Mentions

Social Networks
11. The 11 Commandments of Corporate Tweeting

12. How to retain Facebook fans

13. The complete Twitter ‘follow / unfollow’ guide

14. Top 10 ways to drive blog traffic using LinkedIn

15. The 7 news ways to use Twitter

PR
16. How To Write Media Releases That Google Will Love / Get Page Rank
17. Designing a Social Web Marketing and PR Strategy
18. PR crisis management in the ‘Twitter Age’
19. Blogger relations: 5 tips to hone your approach
20. The PR 2.0 Checklist

Blogging
21. 12 things to do before launching your Blog
22. The Key Traits Of A Successful Blog / Blogger
23. 10 tips for making your Blog posts more del.icio.us
24. 22 Linkbait Headlines That Almost Every Blogger Can Use
25. 10 Ways To Get More Blog Comments

Content / Interaction
26. Planning a content strategy
27. 5 easy steps to creating reusable social media content
28. How to write for search engines without knowing SEO
29. 5 ‘unorthodox’ ways of fixing your social media
30. The anatomy of fruitful online conversation(s)

General / Other
31. How to use Bit.ly (advanced) for spying, link building and happiness
32. 10 great tools to create a mobile version of your site
33. 4 simple ways to integrate analytics into your daily marketing efforts
34. How to manage your online reputation
35. Social Media’s top ‘how to’ blogs
36. Understanding the participatory news consumer (PEW study)
37. Justin Timberlake and the art of presenting well
38. 7 online video tips every B2B marketer should know
39. Simon Mainwaring’s Top Ten Trends for 2010
40. Einstein’s guide to social media (my favorite post of 2010 so far)

The great work of more than 30 people is featured here so be sure to thank them when you click through to the links you are interested in.

I wanted to make special note of a few people featured in this post including Amber Naslund, Jay Baer, Jason Falls, Lee Oddeen and Steve Farnsworth – you share and produce an awful lot of great stuff.

There are also a few posts from me scattered within the selection above – so thanks for supporting those posts as well.

Have fun reading and stay tuned for more throughout the year.

Adam

Link to original post

via socialmediatoday.com

Posted via web from webbuzz by urban-listening