Programming Social Applications

Application Permission Concepts

Applications within a social application container do not automatically have access to a user’s social profiles, activity streams, and friendships—that would be a major security concern. Containers usually require that the application define the permission scopes it needs access to. As shown in Figure 1-8, these scopes will be requests that a user must agree to when installing the application.

Figure 1-8. An application permission screen

Typically, social scopes are defined as major pieces of social information about a user, such as his:

• Profile

• Activity stream

• Friendships

Each container may define different scopes or even include a number of nonsocial scopes that a container may gain access to. Once the user accepts the scopes, the container can do things on his behalf. For the three aforementioned social scopes, these things may respectively include:

• Allowing the application to capture all information within the user’s profile.

• Allowing the application to obtain any activities in the user’s activity stream and to push new activities to this stream on the user’s behalf.

• Allowing the application to obtain the profiles for all of the user’s friends. Although those friends have not necessarily added the application, once a user declares that someone is his friend, it establishes a trust relationship, and applications capitalize on this. Essentially, the user trusts ...