Salmon Protocol RFC draft Now Available

For the past couple of weeks, I've been banging on code and xml to work out a coherent draft spec for the Salmon Protocol. Although Salmon is intended to primarily be a glue protocol, tying together a bunch of disparate existing pieces into an understandable and coherent framework turns out to be a lot of work. Now starts a slog through a bunch of issues (including a backlog on Magic Signatures which need to be addressed) and updating the demo code and libraries to stay in sync with the spec.

Please join the salmon-protocol group if you're interested in working on the Salmon specification and/or writing code that implements it.

In case you're counting, Salmon references 10 other specifications in addition to Magic Signatures.

Webfinger now available for Google public profiles

If you've seen ReadWriteWeb's "Email as Identity", you know that Brad just turned on Webfinger for anyone with a public Google profile.  What this means is that, if (and only if) you've enabled your public Google profile at http://www.google.com/profiles/{username}, you can now use Webfinger to look up information you've added to your profile.  Here's the one for john.panzer for example.  By default this exposes only generic service endpoints, not actual information about the user.  But you can link it to private or public feeds, services, or basically anything you want to associate with your online identity.

A next step for Salmon is to let users add a link to their public key from their Webfinger discovered info.  Then given an email address it will be trivial to look up their preferred public key.  It'd look something like this via the discovery tool:

links {
  rel: "magic-public-key"
  type: "application/magic-public-key"
  href: "data:application/magic-public-key;,RSA.mV...ww.AQAB"
}

Google Buzz and Salmon

You may have heard of a small launch this morning:  Google Buzz is being rolled out to all GMail users right now.

There's an obvious connection to the Salmon Protocol; DeWitt just put up a blog post giving the big picture for Buzz and open protocols on the Social Web blog, and technical details on the Google Code blog from Brian Stoler. Most importantly, there's a Labs Buzz API.  Here's the take-away:

We'd like to take this opportunity to invite developers to join us as we prepare the Google Buzz API for public launch. Our goal is to help create a more social web for everyone, so our plan for the Buzz API is a bit unconventional: we'd like to finalize this work out in the open, and we ask for your participation. By building the Google Buzz API exclusively around freely available and open protocols rather than by inventing new proprietary technologies, we believe that we can work together to build a foundation for generations of sites to come. We're ready to open the doors and share what we've been working on, and we'd like for you to join us in reaching this goal. - Join the Conversation

This is one of the motivations behind Salmon as an open, non-proprietary, standards-based, and interoperable protocol.  This goes two ways:

1. Since Buzz can pull in feed based data from anywhere, we want Buzz comments and likes on that data to flow back upstream to sources like Flickr and blog posts.
2. As services consume the public Buzz streams, we want to make it easy for them to also send salmon back upstream to Buzz as well.

And of course we plan to do this in an way that's decentralized and isotropic, with no most favored site. Buzz is no more central than any other service that talks the necessary protocols.  Come join us on the Buzz API Group to talk more about Buzz and how it's leveraging open, decentralized standards.

Magic Signatures

Just wrote up a detailed Internet-Draft for the Salmon signature mechanism; since it's an outgrowth of the "magic security pixie dust" for Salmon I'm calling it Magic Signatures for now. It approximately matches the Magic Sig demo as well. Feedback welcomed!

(Updated: Just changed the text at http://www.salmon-protocol.org/salmon-protocol-summary as well, hopefully it makes a bit more sense now.)