OAuth

Wei Tu of the Google Accounts Team posted on June 26 that Google has added support for OAuth to all Google Data APIs following a related announcement in April:

The Google Data APIs have always been built on open standards, and today we’re proud to announce that all of the Google Data APIs support OAuth - an open standard for authentication.

You’ll now be able to use standard OAuth libraries to write code that authenticates users to any of the Google Data APIs, such as Google Calendar Data API, Blogger Data API, Picasa Web Albums Data API, or Google Contacts Data API. This should reduce the amount of duplicate code that you need to write, and make it easier for you to write applications and tools that work with a variety of services from multiple providers.

See the documentation for the full details on how to use OAuth with the Google Data APIs.

* OAuth also currently works for YouTube accounts that are linked to a Google Account when using the YouTube Data API.

This is huge news for OAuth and the OAuth community. Google also announced the availability of a multi-scope token feature that allows you to request access to multiple services or resources simultaneously with one call.

Marshall Kirkpatrick wrote about the significance of the announcement as well:

A standard method of authenticating users across different services means that mashup builders need only write one authentication process, then apply it to all data sources that support the standard. That’s hot, and it’s now spreading faster around the web than we thought.

…

Furthermore, we as users can now expect a thrilling new wave of mashup options that can take secure advantage of our Google data. Google’s adoption of oAuth is one of the most significant, tangible moves in support of authentic data portability that we’ve seen in a long time. App developers should be tripping over each other to make use of this data so that our use of their apps can be made richer, more powerfully useful and engaging. While they are developing to take advantage of Google’s oAuth APIs, why not offer some oAuth back out to the world as well? Google’s validation of the standard should start a snowball of standards enabled mashups.

We’re very excited that Google has taken this step to un-silo our data and support the mutually beneficial ecosystem of mashup developers and users. We’re very happy too for the community of oAuth supporters, who have done a great job building and spreading something so needed around the web. Today is a good day for the future of the web.