Tummyrumble

Portable authentication, social networking style

While exchanging a few comments on Stephen Johnston's blog as a result of his post about the Livebookings Diner Booking Interface (duh, DBI for short) with regards to user registration he came up with a brilliant suggestion that never occured to me before.

Portable authentication was all the rage a few years back, where users would be expected to register with one "master service", and other sites then integrate with the "central sign on service" to authenticate users. Like Microsoft Passport (aka Windows Live ID apparently). Users would only have to remember one set of credentials, web sites wouldn't have to build their own user registration, storage and authentication facilities. Great idea, never really took off for some reason. Not invented here?

Anyway. A site that is currently incredibly well positioned to deliver such a portable authentication scheme is Facebook. Now, not being a developer I haven't looked into the Facebook API in detail I am not sure this is currently possible, but it certainly should be. Instead of asking users to register with our own services, we could ask them to sign in using their Facebook user name and password, authenticate the user against the Facebook API and if ok get their profile data and let them into the service.

What hints against it is that to use the Facebook API I think one has to go through their servers, deploying your application through the Facebook site framework. Certainly would be interesting to look into though, and as a complement to register in our services use your already existing Facebook user to gain access / prepopulate contact detail forms.

Creative doodling: Slash7 reader feedback

Slash7 reader feedback
Originally uploaded by Manne.

This is visual feedback on a great post about the creative use of ordinary pen and paper written by Amy Hoy over at Slash7.

I use pen and paper a lot. From lists of things to remember (yes, I sort of use a hacked GTD method to keep track of everything) to mindmaps and small drawings and doodles. Sort of helps me remember I am a person and not an extension of the machine input and output devices.

Why Swedish birth rate figures are struggling

Oh. My. God. This is completely off topic, but to good to pass unnoticed!

Frankly, I'm not sure how Sweden would manage to keep up its relatively high birth rate (compared to rest of Europe, at least) without the existance of such things as massive quantities of Carlsberg beer (see, some good things do come out of Denmark) and ferries to Finland that make it possible for Medel Svensson to purchase Absolut at affordable prices.

Ms. Curiosa goes on to describe her observations on the Swedish dating scene (which really should be called the mating scene since we do tend to do things in the wrong order out of shyness and feeling awkward about meeting new people, funny that) and it is not only hilariously funny, it is also spot on.

Probably, the rescue of the Swedish people will be online dating sites like Match.com where we can hide behind our screens while lulling out in the comfort of our own home (and fridge...) whether we actually want to meet the other person or put them on our ignore list.

URL: Kommissarie F. Curiosa - Feminine curiosity can be deadly: Swedish Mating and Dating.