By David Chartier
August 27, 2008 - 02:01PM CT

As if social media wasn't already, well, social enough, a relatively new open protocol for securely sharing information between web sites, called OAuth, has received a major boost for broad adoption. Developed collectively by a variety of web giants and independent experts, every party involved has signed a covenant not to sue anyone who uses OAuth in a product.

Until OAuth, there wasn't much of a standard for allowing websites to exchange information or users to move their data from one site to another. The tools that sites like LinkedIn and Twitter have employed for sniffing your Gmail contacts for friends who may already use their services often require entering your Google credentials into a non-Google site.

While many of these sites may arguably be trustworthy, a number of efforts collectively called "data portability initiatives" have launched to solve the problems of how to let users move their data between services, and grant secure access in the process. OAuth is just such an initiative, and it has had the developmental backing of individuals and employees of companies like Google, AOL, Yahoo, Twitter, Pownce, Six Apart, Blaine Cook (formerly of Twitter, now at Yahoo), and Mark Atwood.

Conceived in November 2006 with a 1.0 draft formalized nearly a year later, OAuth has been incorporated very recently by a handful of companies, with Google contributing to the movement by adding OAuth to all of its APIs last month. Yahoo also incorporated OAuth this month for the launch of Fire Eagle, its location-aware data arbitration service for social applications and services.