[OpenSocial] Re: Public methods - Vadim Berman - com.googlegroups.opensocial-api

4 messages in com.googlegroups.opensocial-api[OpenSocial] Re: Public methods

From	Sent On	Attachments
Vadim Berman	21 Jul 2008 15:57
Vadim Berman	24 Jul 2008 16:57
justin kruger	24 Jul 2008 17:04
Vadim Berman	27 Jul 2008 23:30

Subject:	[OpenSocial] Re: Public methods
From:	Vadim Berman (vadi...@gmail.com)
Date:	07/24/2008 04:57:02 PM
List:	com.googlegroups.opensocial-api

I suppose it means "no" or "we have no idea".

Pardon me being too straightforward, but does it mean that OpenSocial is yet another kewl buzzword and useful for building only "virtual snowballs" and "X pinged you" kind of things?

Hi OpenSocial gurus,

We are developing a mobile application, which, as one of its functions, connects to the social networks and fetches all kinds of data (user info, event info, relationships between users, etc.).

From the more detailed examination it seems, however, that there is no way to access the user database in "White Pages" style - e.g., search someone by name, or by hometown. It seems that all the APIs, from OpenSocial to Facebook and Friendster, are aimed solely at the creation of "plugins" for the social networks, and require browser- based authentication by the user - which doesn't work for us.

My question is, did I get it right, or knowing a user's login and password it's possible to access their data? Or this would be a security breach?

If not: are there any kind of methods that return some kind of useful publicly available info about the users without authentication? For example, searching public profiles.

Regards, Vadim