Facebook Style API Design

Question

I am working on designing an api/application structure to mimick facebook's for a project of mine. I am wondering what the best way of going about authenticating users is. For an app how do I give them the nessecaru credentials and how do I authenticate those credentials?

Answer 1

I would investigate these technologies before I started down the road:

• OpenSocial this is basically the "open source" facebook platform. You can set up your site as a container, or an application (or some funky combo of both).

• OpenID if you just want to be able to authenticate people using their login credentials from another trusted site

• OAuth if your looking for a API style authentication framework

All of these techs have reference implementations in the usual suspects and are supposed to be more "open" than anything facebook is doing. We will see what happens in the long run...

Answer 2

Well the facebook api actually has an open source implementation so that's fine. But I'm wondering how does facebook actually authenticate everything? Like how do they pass user data to you?