Google Adds OAuth Support
Ryan Confroy;)
Google made an announcement this week that could have a profound impact on Gmail. Google has added OAuth support to Gmail, a feature that will give third-party applications access to certain content from your email account without requiring the password to the account. This is something that you may be familiar with from Twitter, who added OAuth support about a year ago. Rather than handling your username and password, the third party requests access directly from Gmail much like Facebook Connect.
The move is primarily to ensure a more secure gmail, but it could have other benefits. Potentially, this move opens up the doors to third-party developers to create customs applications to sit on top of Gmail. Not unlike Gmail's Labs, third-party developers would be able to create applications that could do anything from fixing little quirky things within Gmail to adding completely new functionality.
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