Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 10:20 AM
See your latest updates on MySpace, read and reply to messages in AOL Mail, and keep track of your Google Book Search Library.
These are the first three gadgets on iGoogle to use OAuth, which is a privacy-preserving security standard that defines how a user can give consent for their data on one website to be accessed by another website (or in this case a gadget). iGoogle never sees the user's password on the other site, and the gadget displays the user's data from the other site without storing any of it on Google's own servers (read more details about OAuth on our Security Blog). With these gadgets on iGoogle, users can now keep track of even more personalized information from across their online life. For example, the MySpace gadget shows your friends' latest updates, status messages, bulletins, and an inbox preview.
With the AOL Mail gadget, you can preview all your email messages in home view. In canvas view, read rich text email, compose, reply, delete, mark as spam, and more. The gadget even includes autocomplete, attachments, spell check, and sorting options. If you have an AOL Mail or AIM Mail account, you must try this gadget.
The Google Book Search Library gadget allows you to keep track of all the books you want to read, and also offers you personalized recommendations. Finding new books and removing books from your library is a snap. You can even preview your books from right within iGoogle's canvas view.
These gadgets are also great examples of how to utilize the canvas view, which launched last month on iGoogle. If you want to create a gadget like AOL and MySpace, this overview will get you started on exposing an API that can be accessed using OAuth. If you already know which OAuth enabled API you want to access, you can jump directly to the gadgets documentation.
