Google + OAuth + OpenID = Google Friend Connect.

They’ve done it again, the boys over at google has released a full javascript API for their Friend Connect services. Which uses services like OAuth and OpenID to authenticate users on your website, and then provide all of the social networking features they want!

taken from official homepage:
“Google Friend Connect lets site owners instantly awaken and strengthen the community that visits their web site. Friend Connect:

• Makes it easy for every site owner to add Friend Connect to their site regardless of their technical capabilities.
• Uses open standards to let visitors control their own data and freely share it with sites and services as they see fit. Services include OpenID providers like Yahoo, social network providers like Twitter, and update aggregators like Plaxo Pulse.

Friend Connect APIs enable developers to:

• Integrate social flows and data directly within a page’s markup, via the OpenSocial standard specification.
• Integrate existing login systems, registered users, and existing data with new social data and activities.
• Create social gadgets & services that are embeddable within millions of Friend Connect enabled sites.”

The factsheet, code examples, tutorials, and more after the turn!

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+ = ?

I caught a jquery tweet today that linked me to an interesting little helper bookmarklet called “SelectorGadget”.

“SelectorGadget is an open source bookmarklet that makes CSS selector generation and discovery on complicated sites a breeze.”

SelectorGadget, is a very easy to use bookmarklet that can be used on any website of your choosing (Although someone in the comments DID have a problem with scraping a site that is NTFW )

To get started with SelectorGadget, head over to their humble website, and install the bookmarklet and watch the video. Anyone with experience in Data Extraction (Hpricot or Beautiful Soup – as the website suggests), will immedately see the benefits of this little application.

With apparent support from JQuery, and its open-source repository over at github, I think SelectorGadget will be able to spawn alot of interest within the various Javascript and DOM Selection/Extraction camp’s around the internet.

Some ideas for you guys to dig your teeth into after the fold.

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