logging into sites with existing accounts

[skaterdav85]

Lately I have been seeing on sites "Sign in using an account you've already created", allowing visitors to log into the site using their google, twitter, or facebook account. Does anyone know how this is done? You can see an example of it on eminem's site on the right hand side where it says Login: http://www.eminem.com/forum/

[thescientist]

You have to use their API's to initiate an authentication call with Facebook/Twitter, etc on the users behalf.

[Synook]

Google, Facebook, et. al. expose OAuth interfaces, which can be used to identify users.http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OAuth.htmlhttp://dev.twitter.com/pages/authhttp://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/

[skaterdav85]

have either of you used OAuth? Are any of the API's easier to use than others?

[thescientist]

have either of you used OAuth? Are any of the API's easier to use than others?

im trying to integrate Facebook stuff into a website I'm working on right now for my friend so it can display his info on the webpage. It took about a day to get the Facebook app setup to get full access to a users account and set it up for offline access. The part that gave me a problem is trying to access their graph API. I could get JSON to display in the browser when testing my URL that way, but not when trying to access the info via an AJAX call. I tried it with FQL, same mixed results. At work we used their REST API, but that will eventually get phased out by Facebook in favor of the graph API. I'll let you know if I have any further luck getting account info via AJAX.

[Synook]

Facebook's API is very easy to use in a basic sense, once you want more information it quickly gets very complex though. Haven't tried the others. If you just want to identify visitors it should be quite straightforward.