An Ubiquity plugin for sharing links on Friend Feed

The moment I saw ubiquity, I wanted to cook up some plugin for it. With the pseudo support for natural language processing, there are apparently many cool extensions that can be written. I read through the ubiquity developer guide and got to writing my first ubiquity plugin.
Since this is the first time, I am not straying away from the twitter example. The verb command would simply by "Share" and the supporting noun would be a text, a URL or this (referring to the current URL). The Page title and the URL would then be posted to my friendfeed page. I always wanted a quick way to share pages without really being forced to type annoying tags or descriptions and later search from the saved links. The FriendFeed search is good and I think this tool would get me that.
A little extension to this would be something in lines of a list of interesting web pages that I have read or mark to be read later. I could announce the webpages that I have read, with contents summarized using online summary tools. I was also looking at the nouns and verbs that ubiquity defines and a useful application would be to combine (something like a unix pipe) the commands into a mega mashup. There is already a command that does this, but it was still in beta and the syntax was not natural.
I hope I am also able to convert most of my firefox extensions to ubiquity commands so that I also end up saving some firefox memory !!
Watch out this space as I write about my learnings and implementations of ubiquity commands.

Sneak-O-Scope on SNAPP

Hi,

A couple of posts back, I was talking about a framework that helps converting any website into an opensocial application. In the meanwhile, I was also looking at making Sneak-O-Scope better and extending to other platforms like MySpace, Friendster and Ning. The easiest way for for this was to morph the application into a website and let SNAPP convert it to application on the respective platforms.
I am also working on showing the data better using the Google Visualization tools, to watch out this space for updates on the application. Sneak-O-Scope was release a month ago, and it is not installed on a 1000 profiles. Not impressive numbers, but I guess the application is growing in absense of using the Activity Stream.

SNAPP Presentation

Snapp

Barcamp Bangalore 7

At BCB7 on the weekend of 13-Sep-08 and 14-Sep-08.

SNAPP - Converting your existing websites into opensocial application

A few days ago, I had written about the bug that I discovered in iRead. That was the time when I was working on a framework; and I just managed to complete it. We decided to call it SNAPP, short for Social Network APPlication. This blog post is a quick introduction about the framework. The technical details will follow.
SNAPP is a simple framework that can help convert an existing website into an opensocial application without really having to worry about the API that Orkut or MySpace expose. Some of the problems that developers face porting existing sites include

1. AJAX calls have to be changed since the applications are not hosted on the domain of the website.
   
2. User management can no longer be handled using cookies directly.
3. Work needs to be done to create new JSP/PHP pages.
4. Security needs a whole new look.
   

SNAPP tries to address these by opening a modified website page inside another iFrame that points to the domain of the website. This way, user management and AJAX calls still remain unchanged. The modification can simply be making the page work in the dimensions specified by Orkut or MySpace.
Opening the website iFrame however denies the site, data provided by opensocial. Hence, SNAPP posts most of the required data when the iFrame is loaded. Subsequent calls can be made by the cross-domain inter-frame communication module on SNAPP. This ensures that the its is easy to start applications with SNAPP, and extension can also be done easily.
Watch out this space for updates on SNAPP. SNAPP is an opensocial project, so please do pitch in with our ideas. If you own a website and want to make an opensocial application out of it, please do write to me. Would be glad to help.

Hacking Opensocial Applicaitons - iRead

For the past week, I was working on an tool that would convert any website to an opensocial application with minimal changes. It was then that I realized that authentication of either the person viewing an application, or the application owner was not trivial. Impersonation was simple, mainly because no secret can really be stored in the application, as discussed here.
I looked up some applications to see how they were looking at authentication and found that they were actually vulnerable! I looked at at iRead on Orkut; they seems closest to nice security, but this post is all about logging in as someone else and breaking it !!
All you have to do is look up Opensocial IDs of people whom you want to impersonate and change the cookie on this page.

To look up the Ids of people, you could execute the following code here.

function getData() { var req = opensocial.newDataRequest(); req.add(req.newFetchPersonRequest(opensocial.DataRequest.PersonId.VIEWER), 'viewer'); req.add(req.newFetchPeopleRequest(opensocial.DataRequest.Group.VIEWER_FRIENDS), 'viewerFriends'); req.send(onLoadFriends); }; function onLoadFriends(dataResponse) { var viewer = dataResponse.get('viewer').getData(); var html = 'Friends of ' + viewer.getDisplayName(); html += ':<br /><ul>'; var viewerFriends = dataResponse.get('viewerFriends').getData(); viewerFriends.each(function(person) { html += '<li>' + person.getDisplayName() + ' = ' + person.getId() + '</li>'; }); html += '</ul>'; document.getElementById('dom_handle').innerHTML = html; };getData()

You should see the Ids of the people on below the code. Pick up any code and change the cookie of http://orkut.weread.com/iread_index.php to log in as the person. Cookies can be changed for a page using the Firefox Web developer toolbar.
I am working on a mechanism to better identify (read authenticate without asking for a password), so watch out the blog for findings. Till then, happy hacking opensocial applications !!