iGoogle support for OAuth

Today Google announced that our iGoogle gadget platform provides native support for accessing OAuth enabled APIs.  AOL & MySpace both used this feature to create sophisticated gadgets that use OAuth APIs which they expose on their sites to those gadgets.  We also announced a few weeks ago that this feature can be used with the Google Data APIs which also all support OAuth.  We hope to convince more major websites to expose OAuth APIs that can be used by gadgets, as well as for other mashups by 3rd party developers.  Our Content Partnership team has already begun efforts to reach out to potential websites (http://contentcentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/share-information-securely-with-your.html).

While currently this feature does not support the Scalable OAuth extension which is required by some SPs such as Yahoo, we already have that working in our lab and hope to have it live on the iGoogle sandbox in the next 2-3 weeks.

We are looking for other interesting gadgets that developers can create which use this feature.  In particular, we are looking for interesting gadgets that mashup data from multiple OAuth SPs.  An even bigger challenge will be to create the first social gadget that uses the OAuth Proxy.  That feature is available on orkut.com, and it has also been contributed to the open source OpenSocial container called Shindig.  We have provided early documentation on how that feature can be used at http://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/oauth-proxy/social-oauthproxy, however we are waiting for some good examples before finalizing the documentation.

p.s. We also recently announced that our Enterprise E-mail outsourcing customers on GoogleAppsForYourDomain can enable 2-legged OAuth support, as well as the existing 3-legged OAuth support.  This feature has been much popular then expected, and is a good early sign of the potential for enterprise SaaS vendors to use OAuth as well.