I believe that my year old IT Landscape diagram is up for a few updates now. Predominantly in the Analysis side of things as well as in the examples for each of the components in it. There is however one tech that is muddling my thoughts. XAuth.
XAuth is a new initiative from Google, Yahoo!, Meebo, etc. – an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web. It could help as a bridge between ‘individual’ & ‘community’ social channels as per our SCRM vision diagram & in the User Components section of the SCRM IT Landscape diagram.
It is still not clear to me how much of a value it provides in terms of the functionality that it believes it provides to the end users. One clear value is that it will make the existing Open ID, OAuth, etc. very usable for the end users & thus could get wider usage. Businesses need to use it if they want to provide a good user experience, but wonder if it would be easier or tougher to get profile information into the enterprise systems. Because XAuth is supposed to be very good with Privacy implementation. The users’ id even is not shared with anybody, just that the user is logged into some site that uses XAuth.
Links for further reading:
What: http://xauth.org/info/
Why: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/04/simplifying-social-web-with-xauth.html
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/xauth_oauth_and_yahoo_openid.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1621779/xauth-explained-solving-a-real-social-net-problem-you-may-never-know-you-had
How: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-xauth-to-simplify-social-web.html
