As the web becomes more social, more people want to share information with their friends and colleagues across a wide array of services. While most of these services provide APIs to facilitate sharing, the ever-increasing number of these services with unique APIs makes integration costly for publishers and limits the likelihood that lesser-known services will be supported.
OExchange, a new protocol spearheaded by Clearspring, aims to address this problem by specifying a conventional way for publishers to “offer” links to sharing services, and for sharing services to design their API endpoints.
OExchange also provides a mechanism for publishers to discover information about new services that they’ve never seen before using a format called XRD on top of an emerging protocol called host-meta, which happens to benefit from XAuth as well.
We’re happy to report that the Google Buzz sharing API (which powers the Google Buzz Buttons) has supported the basic model of OExchange since it was first released.
As we announced the launch of Google Buzz, we are committed to adopting open protocols and technologies that promote interoperability and intend for Google Buzz to be a good citizen on the social web. OExchange is a promising effort that seeks to simplify and make sharing easier for publishers and service providers alike. We invite you to read over the quick start guide, technical specification, and try out the helpful tools that Clearspring has prepared to make supporting this technology clear and simple. Your feedback is welcome on the OExchange mailing list.
Posted by Chris Messina, Social Web Developer Relations Team
