OExchange

Sharing, Posting, and Liking aren’t the only things users do with web content. They translate it with online translation services, they send it to formatting and printing services, they add it to their personal organization tools, they save it for later. The set of verbs involved is much greater than “sharing”, “posting”, and “liking” — its in fact almost infinite, especially once internationalized. Protocols and tools must support this.

The public website, which contains the spec, guides, tools, just about everything.

OExchange is an open protocol for sharing any URL with any service on the web.

Check all related collateral and code.

This is a list dedicated to the development, implementation, and support of the OExchange specification.

A brief overview of the what and why of OExchange

A short technical introduction to OExchange

OExchange essentially establishes a common way for services like Posterous and Google Buzz to receive content. The protocol defines how third-party tools, e.g. Clearspring’s bookmarking and sharing service AddThis, can dynamically discover and share content to these services, as well as how sharing tools can read and set a user’s sharing preferences.

In a conversation with another OExchange team member, we dug deeper into what OExchange’s creators hope this tool will accomplish. They seem to think that posting an article on Arizona gun control law changes to a niche community for Arizona gun owners, for example, is currently prohibitively difficult. Between cutting, pasting, link-shortening and summarizing, some synaptic connections are lost and some signal interference is encountered. They’d like to make that process a lot easier.

The argument for supporting OExchange is that if you want to share information on large publisher sites right now, like the New York Times, you have a limited selection of destinations that you can publish to. While most users are on Facebook, Twitter, and other common sharing platforms, there are plenty of other communities where users prefer to share their favorite content.

In a press release, Chris Messina, who is now the Open Web Advocate at Google was quoted as saying, ”The key to increasing the amount and quality of sharing online is smoothing out the user interaction. By simplifying the underlying mechanism for cross-site sharing with OExchange, people can focus on what they’re sharing, rather than how.”

Content-sharing toolmaker Clearspring today introduced OExchange, a way for services to inspire link-sharing without establishing formal relationships to get their logos next to Facebook’s widespread “like” buttons. OExchange is an open protocol that helps content sites dynamically discover relevant sharing services, send them content in a format they can accept and interpret user sharing preferences as explicitly stated.

The Google Buzz API and blogging service Posterous already support OExchange. The project has also gotten some big names like Clearspring, its initiator, Digg, Echo, Instapaper, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PrintFriendly, Springpad, StumbleUpon, Webs.com and yfrog on board. Its initiators have also reached out to Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook. Facebook is very unlikely to join the initiative, but Twitter, though reluctant for now, and Yahoo may, as they have a good-enough track record when it comes to open standards.

Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability.org and vice president of product strategy and community at Echo commented, “To make the Social Web as Interoperable as the Document Web, it’s key to have strong standards for sharing information. OExchange is an essential step to continuing the inexorable march towards a peer-to-peer social network where every node is a first class citizen.” OExchange, which is licensed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement.

We asked Messina how the protocol would increase the shareability of content. "Rather than 'increasing the shareability of content', OExchange simply makes it easier to personalize sharing interfaces and integrate with less well-known services," he responded. "However, because this may give rise to a long-tail of sharing providers, it's possible that content will be shared across a wider and more diverse audience than before."

This would be an improvement over the current implementation of AddThis which displays a predetermined set of 13 other Web sites in a small menu or a daunting list of several dozen sharing services in an expanded menu, an experience not unlike NASCAR logo overload. Clearspring is encouraging the over 300 services working with AddThis and the over 800 seeking AddThis integration to adopt OExchange.

As we announced the launch of Google Buzz, we are committed to adopting open protocols and technologies that promote interoperability and intend for Google Buzz to be a good citizen on the social web. OExchange is a promising effort that seeks to simplify and make sharing easier for publishers and service providers alike. We invite you to read over the quick start guide, technical specification, and try out the helpful tools that Clearspring has prepared to make supporting this technology clear and simple. Your feedback is welcome on the OExchange mailing list.

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OExchange ist ein offenes Protokoll um eine beliebige URL mit einem beliebigen Service im Web zu teilen. Die Demo zeigt die Funktionsweise von OExchange und welche Vorteile sich in Kombination mit z.B. XAuth ergeben.

OExchange is a specification for URL-based content sharing on the Web, introduced by a number of online service providers and social networking sites. OExchange is licensed under Open Web Foundation Agreement.

"OExchange is a key component in providing a complete open solution for content sharing online,” Hooman Radfar (News - Alert), chief executive officer of Clearspring Technologies, said. “We are excited as it will enable a new generation of applications that can help better connect people with the communities they are about."

There are two networks that are noticeably missing from the OExchange adoption–Facebook and Twitter. Facebook makes sense because we all know they are on a path to world domination and want to control your identity in the digital space. Facebook would prefer that these other services simply adopt any protocol they create.

New open protocol service wants to connect any content to any sharing platform. It's a pretty simple idea when you think about it: people share content on various sites, so why not make it easier for content publishers (what OExchange call "sources") to get their content placed on various service providers (which they call "targets"), like Linkedin, Buzz, and others.