Social Media Integration OAuth and OpenId

2 years ago, I started a family tree development with Facebook Connect. It was a project using facebook integration in ASP.NET.  However, I wasn't quite conviced with the javascript api from facebook. I think mainly because it is not stable enough. I awared that there are something called OAuth and OpenID available. And, these should be the right things to apply in my project. But, not really doing any further research on them.

A year ago, I played with JS Node. A fun stuff to investigate especially writting server side javascript for twitter tweeks.

Recently, I've better exposure to other projects, such as the interaction with twitter, linkedIn integration, etc. LinkedIn was the one which I found quite interesting especially the seriousness of the data.

Well, regardless which Social Media you want to connect and integrate, you need an authentication process to be done before you are allowed to pull any information from them. Basically, there are 2 famous component/technolgoies available in the market that widely used by the social media providers:

1. OAuth  (e.g.: LinkedIn, Facebook ) - All about authentication token.
2. OpenId (e.g.: Google, Yahoo, etc) - More suitable for Single Signon.

I found couple of websites provide useful and handy example on how to use DotNetOAuth: (http://www.dotnetopenauth.net/)

DotNetOAuth and LinkedIn in MVC:
http://scatteredcode.wordpress.com/2011/12/01/dotnetopenauth-oauth-and-mvc-for-dummies/


OpenId - Single SignOn using Google in MVC3
http://www.tkglaser.net/2012/02/single-sign-on-using-google-in-asp-mvc.html
(where you can use the same component (DotNetOpenAuth.dll) from http://www.dotnetopenauth.net/


Facebook Connect
http://devtacular.com/articles/bkonrad/how-to-retrieve-user-data-from-facebook-connect-in-aspnet/