Zhephree

Synergy: it’s possibly the best thing about webOS. I can access multiple phone numbers, e-mail addresses, IM accounts, and Facebook account for a single contact, all in one place. After adding my Facebook account, I can upload pictures and video direct from the OS.

But Synergy can be so much more. For instance, look at Facebook: without a patch, adding your account doesn’t enable Facebook chat through the Messaging app, like AIM and other accounts do. 

And Twitter — there’s really no support for Twitter built into the OS, save for Universal Search.

Here’s my proposal to Palm: have an Accounts app where I can add my Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts. Let me send and receive Facebook messages through the Mail app as an account in the app. Let me chat through Facebook chat. Create a Publish app that lets me send pictures and text to Facebook and Twitter separately or cross-post to both. Build this into the OS.

And, allow apps to post through these accounts and get info from a user’s social graph. Similar to how apps ask to use Location Services, an alert that asks the user if, say, Bad Kitty can use your Twitter account. No need to go through the OAuth steps for every app that uses Twitter. Same goes for Facebook.

Now, obviously, this poses a problem for app branding. Facebook and Twitter each allow apps to have links below each post saying “via App Name” and that links to the website of the app, which promotes the app with each Tweet or status update. If every webOS app used the already-linked accounts in webOS, every app would say the same “via webOS” tagline. Not that helpful for developers. However, if I had both my professional account (zhephree) and my personal account (sirgeoph) already linked to webOS, a Twitter app like Bad Kitty could query the list of Twitter accounts and say “Authorize these accounts with Bad Kitty?” and as a suer taps on each account, they walk through the OAuth (or XAuth if webOS stored both the username and password) path to authorize the app to use those accounts, which then gives us the normal “via AppName” bylines.

While that might not save actual time, it does make the process seem easier. If I just had to tap on a few buttons to link an account that’d be way better than typing in my username in each app.

Or, if webOS stored the username and password for each account, an API in the SDK could have a method for connecting via XAuth. An app could initiate Mojo.Social.authorizeTwitter(“zhephree”) and then webOS would handle exchanging the username and password for a token which is then passed back to the application. This way, the app never gets the credentials, but it does get an authorization token so it could perform actions on behalf of the user. This makes things a bit more secure as you only give your phone your credentials and they could be encrypted and each app never sees the actual credentials.

This would require no typing from the user, just tapping a few confirmation dialogs. This would allow even more rapid development on webOS AND help make the OS more Synergistic. 

Just some thoughts.