Social Networks and OpenID
by bear
Listening to the various conversations people have been having about Social Networking sites and OpenID reminds me of the older TV commercial where two people walking, one with peanut butter and the other with chocolate, collide and the chocolate person finds their bar stuck into the peanut butter. Anywho, you get the idea I hope - this is what I think of Open ID + Social Networks. The combination of the two is an improvement that allows growth for both. Dave Cohen back in May had this to say:
But as these social networks proliferate, one thing that would be incredibly helpful would be a “write once, use many” centralized user profile. I would love to see OpenID go in this direction (or someone leveraging OpenID) by allowing users to create their base profile in one place rather than having to constantly enter it into every network they want to check out.
and Simon Willison calls this out in one of his Six cool things you can build with OpenID post:
Decentralised social networks The problem with social networks is that you end up with profiles scattered across multiple different sites, and friend relationships that are duplicated in multiple places. The globally unique identifier offered by OpenID offers the basis for a decentralised social network, with profiles tied together across multiple sites and relationships easily portable between services. Hopefully the above ideas explain why I am personally excited about OpenID, and why I’m dedicating so much time to encouraging its adoption. The more people there are that understand and use OpenID, the more interesting applications we can build with it.
Because all Social Networks are so web-centric and all of them have the same identity issues I don’t doubt the smart ones will be embracing OpenID as a way to enable cross-domain conversations. I just hope they all don’t sit behind their data walls hoarding information – kinda how Facebook is acting currently.
If you are curious about OpenID a great site to start with is claimID. They have an amazingly easy interface and are staying on top of all of the enhancements that are happening in the OpenID realm.