Is There a Looming Battle Over OAuth's Successor?

The OAuth protocol, used on many popular Web sites and applications to pass your credentials between sites without requiring the entry of your user name and password, including Twitter, is potentially under pressure from a team of techies representing Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!, who have introduced a competing specification interpreted as being aimed to succeed OAuth, called Web Resource Authorization Protocol, or WRAP. Eran Hammer-Lahav, the Director of Standards Development at Yahoo!, who helped coordinate many OAuth contributions, and created a formal specification for the initial OAuth standard, recently panned the move, saying, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," adding his own proposal for OAuth 2.0, which he hopes will better separate between authentication and authorization.

Today's OAuth standard is known to have its imperfections. Hammer-Lahav notes in his 2.0 proposal that OAuth is essentially "unusable" for mobile devices or installed apps, and also suggests that OAuth "does not adequately support large providers". But he says the move to create WRAP has confused developers' focus, and diverted resources, calling it "just one illustration of the demise of the OAuth community".

But his opinion, unsurprisingly, is not universally accepted. David Recordon of Facebook, also on the boards of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations, states in the comments of the post that Facebook is not supporting OAuth 1.0 as it is simply too heavy - requiring a massive increase in HTTP requests, also adding that other developers find OAuth "too difficult to correctly implement".

David followed on to his initial comments with a post to the IETF mailing list, which you can see here: Facebook, OAuth, and WRAP. In the note, he highlights the belief that the proposed WRAP alternative maps well to the company's current authentication process, adding WRAP simplifies the development community's learning curve.

The discussion, which is ongoing, may end up splintering development communities between sticking with the current version of OAuth 1.0, looking at WRAP as an alternative, or trying to support a new OAuth 2.0, as specified by Hammer-Lahav. But if you have wondered why Facebook Connect acts one way and Twitter OAuth acts another way, it's because they are different approaches entirely. If this discussion is any indication, one can expect there to be continued divergence, rather than a single way to deliver user authentication and authority between sites and applications in the future on the Web.

For another viewpoint on this broad topic, see Jesse Stay's post: The Future Has No Log In Button. Also, DeWitt Clinton of Google, on FriendFeed, says the open discussion "is good".

BackType Feeds Partners Faster, Thanks to PubSubHubbub

BackType, the most robust and feature-rich comments tracker on the Web, has expanded its services over the last few months to include a number of new items, including the launch of BackTweets, to find shared links on the microblogging service, a TweetCount plugin to highlight the number of times items have been retweeted, and a BackType Connect plugin for WordPress to show related conversations around the Web attached to your blog. The company's API is also used by popular services including Bit.ly and Disqus, who leverage the service to find external links and related tweets. Today, these downstream partners can expect updates to happen in near real-time, thanks to BackType's jumping on the PubSubHubbub bandwagon, in a partnership with Superfeedr, providing practically instantaneous updates downstream.

Superfeedr, one of the more aggressive services promoting PubSubHubbub, is providing the legwork for BackType, acting as a hub, pushing updates automatically as they are discovered. In today's post, BackType says the move reduces load on publishers by sending feed updates to all potential subscribers, without requiring multiple polls, and avoiding the arbitrary nature of clients' periodic requests.

If you subscribe to BackType to follow individuals' comments, or if you simply use Disqus or BackType connect on your blog, the move will ensure updates reach your content faster than they ever have before. In a Web world that is getting increasingly real-time, the name PubSubHubbub keeps popping up, and BackType is staying on the leading edge of innovation.

By Thinking Small, Data Robotics' Success Looking Big

2008 and 2009 haven't been particularly kind for many companies. Amidst a cacophony of bailouts, bankruptcies, lowered valuations and layoffs, Data Robotics, a direct attached storage manufacturer based in Santa Clara, has delivered growth exceeding 100 percent in each of the last two years - and hopes to be on track for going public via an IPO some time in the next two years. Combined with a popular product line, which was enhanced with a pair of new models today, you can see they have bucked the trend, surprising many people, including me, with their success.

Initially known as Trusted Data, before changing the company's name in 2007 to better reflect the company's automation capabilities without confusing customers into thinking they were a security company, I have known the company and its founder, CEO Geoff Barrall, for several years, having once worked with him as a colleague, and even working for him directly from 2004-05. (Consider that my disclosure)

When he started Data Robotics in 2005, I wasn't all that keen on yet another small storage array entering the market, even if it was aimed at consumers, and came with nifty features, like a meter that showed disk utilization on its facade.

My skepticism, and that of others, didn't deter Barrall, as he and the company found niches for its Drobo desktop storage arrays, including the creative professional community, and most recently, the federal market, which has become the company's primary vertical, I was told. The company has made a name for itself over the last few years with a distinctive product appearance, a proprietary non-RAID architecture that aims to protect data in the event of disk failures, and the potential ability to upgrade forever, simply through swapping out disks for those in a larger size, thanks to evolutions in disk density, that have seen capacities grow from the hundreds of gigabytes not too long ago to multiple terabytes today.

In the most recent year, Data Robotics accrued approximately $30 million in revenue, double that of the previous year, and quadruple the one prior. With the current quarter looking well, Barrall told a group of storage geeks, as part of Gestalt IT's Tech Field Day, a few weeks ago that doubling revenue again was not out of the question. Having seen profitable months already, the company intends to blast through break-even, and test the public markets when both they and Drobo are ready.


Drobo Teased Us With A Preview Earlier This Month
Today, the company added on to their product line with the new Drobo S and a new iSCSI SAN, the Drobo Elite. While some vendors, such as EMC or NetApp, started at the top of the market and are working their way down, Data Robotics started with the consumer and is working its way up into bigger devices, up to a significant 32 terabytes in its latest gear.

In contrast to my "set it and hope to forget it" Apple Time Capsule, which stays a single configuration for ever and ever, until I get rid of it, the Drobo can be upgraded over time, and doesn't blink at seeing disks of different sizes in the same array. Though it requires a second device, called DroboShare, to provide Network Attached Storage (NAS) functionality, it is quite compelling, especially as I start to increase my creation and archival of rich media storage, as most fathers of twins no doubt do.

The new entrants to the product family aren't necessarily for the low-end consumers like me, who might do just fine with a 4-bay desktop storage device, and don't need iSCSI functionality, but they show that the company is filling any gaps in the market that may prevent it from continuing its doubling of growth. At a time when many companies are shuffling the deck and trying to mute bad news, Data Robotics has been quietly growing.

See additional coverage from this morning around the Web:

• Engadget: Data Robotics introduces 5-bay Drobo S, enterprise-ready DroboElite
  
• Pack Rat: Drobo Goes Sideways and Slantways With the Drobo S and Drobo Elite

my6sense Update Adds Time Filters, Social Enhancements

At the end of last week, my6sense, an iPhone application focused on digital intuition, helping you reduce information overload through focusing on content most relevant to you, introduced version 1.1 of their service to the iTunes application store. While the company mentioned the update as being "full of goodies", the top update that impacts my usage is that of filtering of relevant items by time, ensuring my focus in on items relevant both in content and in recency.


my6sense Offers Time Filters on their Relevancy Stream
my6sense's approach thus far has been to surface the most relevant items from your RSS feeds into the application, even if the article was published weeks or months ago. With the latest push, you can limit the "Relevancy" tab to the last 12, 24 or 48 hours, while the company's algorithms still apply.


The Updated Stream, Which I am Mastering, Highlights New Items
As you can imagine, for somebody like me, who reads practically every article through Google Reader when at the desktop, poring through thousands of items on a small screen like the iPhone can be a challenging task. my6sense's move to reduce clutter in my stream is a good thing, and making sure the items are new is just as important a step. The move is a major reason I recently progressed through the company's levels of digital intuition, reaching "Master" on Sunday. I've been told there are 2 or 3 more levels to go to improve.

Disclosure: my6sense is a client of Paladin Advisors Group, where I am Managing Editor of New Media. My comments on the company's product are always independent, and do not pass their way in advance.