| By Kevin Fox | July 18th, 2007 | Comments [3]
With the steady increase in the number of ‘Social Network Sites’ over the past year, and being that JanRain is all about OpenID, we are definitely interested in the question “Could OpenID be Our Savior to the Social Network Blues?” Well, the short answer is Yes!
The longer answer is that with the attribute exchange feature in the soon to be released OpenID 2.0 spec you can specify custom fields for your online persona. For example a ‘friends’ field could be populated with a list of the OpenID accounts for your family, friends, and professional network. This field, if requested from a relying party (Social Network Site X) could then be passed on and automatically populate your network.
Thats the beauty of OpenID, its single-sign on and identification for users across websites, applications, networks. It enables portable identity, and shifts ownership of the user to the user. This gives people the opportunity to use their identities for reputation, social exchange, communications, and more.
If you have any questions about OpenID please visit us in the OpenID Channel On Pibb:
July 18, 2007 at 6:40 pm
Awesome! I knew you guys would step up to savior status.
Looking forward to the 2.0 spec. Will there be an easy way for existing OpenID servers to “upgrade” to the 2.0 spec, or will it just be a manual process?
Cheers,
ewH
July 18, 2007 at 9:31 pm
It will depend on how a site has OpenID support implemented. If you are using a CMS like Wordpress, Drupal, Plone, etc. you will be able to just download an updated module. If you implemented OpenID manually it will require a manual upgrade. Though nothing fundamental should change so the migration should not be difficult.
The creation and standardization of what ‘custom attribute’ fields to pass around will be where the challenge will lay…
August 1, 2007 at 3:04 pm
myExperiment - http://myexperiment.org/ is a free software social network that uses OpenID exclusively. We also recommend myOpenID as its preferred provider.