I'm looking for thing to read on that subject, if you have any introduction or overview...

Here is some news article: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57531366-93/firefox-beta-adds-preliminary-support-for-social-api/
And here some more details: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox_Social_Integration & https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/SocialAPI
The official documentation seems to be here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Social_API, but content migration from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/User:Sheppy/Social_API_temp is not finished yet is seems.

Thanks ;)

Uhm - I think for Friendica it might be a good idea to create not only a producer, but also be able to mimic the API as a consumer. That way we benefit from any service writing a connector for it - and can easily bring them into our Friendica stream.

Didn't think of that, thats a funny idea
But if I understand correctly, the producer delivers a javascript file to the browser which runs it as a worker, so that might be difficult - we would need some way to run this Javascript file on the server, or we need to inspect every producer's javascript file and reprogram it in PHP. But this would be more work and will break if the producer makes changes.

Some more info:

- The about:config entry mentioned in https://raw.github.com/mixedpuppy/socialapi-demo/master/README.md is sufficient, but I needed to restart Firefox.
- Even if http://mixedpuppy.github.com/ is added to the activation whitelist, I was not able to activate the test provider by clicking onto the button on http://mixedpuppy.github.com/socialapi-demo/index.html. I think this means that at least with Firefox 17, users will not be able to use the Social API with Friendica unless they create about:config entries. This could be solved with a small Firefox addon that creates the needed about:config entries. It could also be that this requirement vanishes until the Social API is released in a stable Firefox version.
- There is a manifest file which defines the URL of a Javascript worker and of a HTML sidebar which may display arbitrary content. The worker and sidebar can communicate through events. Additionally, there are events to create/update icons(+counters) that are placed right to the address bar, plus events that are emitted when a user clicks onto the "share this site" button (integrated into address bar). The worker is allowed to make AJAX calls.

Here is a more complete picture how the Social API may look like: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2012/10/22/help-us-test-the-social-api-with-facebook-messenger-for-firefox/

I could imagine that the worker keeps requesting Friendica's /ping (which returns network/intro/mail/home counters and a list of notifications). The counters could be displayed at the icons right to the address bar, and the notifications in the sidebar. Moreover, we could implement the "share this site" functionality using the existing Friendica API method /api/statuses/update. This would already provide a basic user experience.
All this could be done in Javascript, without writing any PHP code I think (except for inserting the "manifest" link tag into the HTML page), so it should be no problem to implement it as a Friendica addon.

Actually there is some PHP needed to simplify the determination of the currently logged in user. I couldn't resist trying, a very rough version of a Social API addon is here: https://github.com/Leberwurscht/friendica-addons/tree/mozsocial/mozsocial

Now it is a bit more stable. This is how it looks like currently:


The only problem is that the Friendica session seems to get closed when the browser is closed, and users who are too lazy to check their Friendica site regularly will probably also be too lazy to log in each time they start the browser.

That the session is closed is not Friendica's fault I think, this might be a bug or misconfiguration of my Aurora installation.

The normal php session functions don't allow for persistent cookies - which is a shame. We can get around it using dedicated cookies, but then you also need a lot of dedicated session management code. I've heard of people tracking down and altering the expiration of the php session id cookie (and still use php session functions) but haven't seen enough demand for persistent connections to warrant the effort. Would be convenient to provide the option of always being logged in.

I made some improvements to the addon, and now it is running much more reliable I think. There is also a persistent login now (but works only for this addon), following http://www.jaspan.com/improved_persistent_login_cookie_best_practice

One thing that is not implemented is that users logged in with a login cookie shouldn't be able to change the password or use functions from the admin panel. This can't be done with an addon I think.

I also talked with the people in irc.mozilla.org#socialdev and they are too busy to get multi-provider support working in Firefox 17. So Firefox 17 will only support Facebook, but it might be possible to write a Firefox addon that changes some about:config entries to get Friendica compatibility. This would break the social API for Facebook, however.

This would break the social API for Facebook, however.

And this is a problem because ????



We did get persistent cookies a few days ago. We still do need to do something to separate the api login from the regular web session.

@Commander Zot Cool, I didn't notice that! I'll try to adopt that for the addon.

@Jan Reher Sure we need beta testers Feel free to download the addon from https://github.com/Leberwurscht/friendica-addons/tree/mozsocial/mozsocial !
Then you need to install Firefox beta. You can create a new firefox profile with './firefox -no-remote -ProfileManager' on the command line, so that you don't interfere with your production profile. Then you can start firefox beta with './firefox -no-remote -P profile_name'.
You need to open about:config and add the social.manifest.friendica entry as described in the addon README. You need to adapt the address of your friendica server.
Moreover, you should set social.manifest.facebook to an empty string. Otherwise you will get bugs, as firefox does not support multiple providers.
Then you must restart Firefox, and toggle the about:config entries social.active and socia.enabled. After that, you should see the sidebar and the friendica icon at the top right corner of the browser.