AOL OpenAuth

After many months of work, we've finally posted the documentation for AOL's Open Authentication APIs at dev.aol.com/openauth! This is an exciting day for the authentication development team, but even more exciting for us as a company because it further proves the company's commitment to open protocols.

On the development front we've very proud of the new APIs and the interesting applications they make possible. Yes there are other "open" APIs out there. But we think we've got an innovative approach that isn't matched elsewhere. With AOL Open Authentication, a user can be authenticated and an authentication token returned to a site or AJAX application. What's interesting is that the application can then interact with other AOL services on behalf of the user. If the user hasn't given permission (granted consent) to that 3rd party, an exception is returned and a URL can be loaded that prompts the user for said consent.

We'll probably get some questions about why we invented another proprietary, albeit open, authentication protocol. Especially since we recently announced support for OpenId. Does AOL Open Authentication mean we're not committed to OpenId? The answer to that is an emphatic No! It does NOT mean we're backing off from our OpenId position. In fact, our goal is to use open protocols whenever possible, and being fans of OpenId that's our preference. But OpenId does not currently support the breadth of use cases we must support, particularly service invocation or consent management. That said, we are working on a prototype extension to OpenId intended to cover some of those additional use cases.

On the company front, we're very happy because we think these APIs, and others in the pipeline, cement AOL's commitment to being "open" and providing APIs for different services. The internal buzz we hear from our developer kin in other groups about providing APIs to different services and AOL's growing involvement with developer communities is starting to give us some great momentum, as we continue to build on our new strategy. And that's great news to us.

- OpenAuth Team