In an effort to remind people that it had a horse in the identity management race, MySpace last night announced MySpace ID – essentially a rename of the MySpace Data Availability project launched earlier this year to allow users to login with their MySpace credentials and import data on third-party sites. The news comes on the heels of last week’s near-simultaneous launches of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect, two similar products from MySpace competitors (though the latter, it turns out, is more of an ally)
While much has been written about the technical differentiators between these services – MySpace embracing an “open” approach including plans to integrate with Google Friend Connect versus Facebook’s “walled garden” – another piece of the puzzle is clearly starting to emerge: a battle for the different demographics of the Web.
As we recently noted in analyzing the growth of Facebook and stagnation of MySpace, it’s not so much that MySpace is losing users in droves as it is that Facebook might be gaining completely new ones – users that previously didn’t belong to any social network. Looking at the partners that each social network has signed on thus far, much of the split is along the demographic lines you’d expect: Facebook partners include brands targeting more tech savvy and affluent demographics: CBS, CNET, Digg, and Hulu, to name a few, while MySpace touts more mainstream partners such as AOL, Yahoo, and eBay.
Think about it from a site owner’s perspective: offering your users a way to login without creating an account is probably going to help increase registrations, but not if your users don’t use the identity provider you’re in bed with. And from the perspective of the “big three,” the high profile partners they work with will dictate where the last mile of their users come from. For example, I’d venture to guess a CBS.com visitor is more likely to join Facebook, while an eBay user is more likely to join MySpace.
Meanwhile, Google Friend Connect sits somewhere in the middle of all this, offering users multiple sign-in options, though not returning the same benefits of Facebook and MySpace: publishing data back to social networks. That approach would work great and be the clear winner – if Facebook agreed to be a part of it. That probably won’t happen anytime soon, so until then, look for implementations that play to the demographics of individual websites and their respective identity provider.
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Facebook Connect is now open for business, allowing any developer to let users login to their websites using their Facebook credentials. Additionally, other key Facebook features, like your friends list, can now be integrated into third-party applications, which can in turn send data back into Facebook and the News Feed.
If there were an OpenID for Dummies book, its publisher would be Facebook Connect, because for all intents and purposes, it’s the same thing, at least to 99.9% of end users who experience it. For an example of how it works, the new Citysearch beta, which launched a couple weeks ago, allows users to use their Facebook login to write reviews and leave comments. Those actions are then broadcast back to the Facebook News Feed.
That’s a big win for two obvious reasons: (1) you don’t need to register for a Citysearch account, provided you’re one of the 130 million people that now has Facebook, (2) Citysearch gets a ton of free exposure, as Facebook users who leave reviews and comments have those activities broadcast back to their mini-feed.
Now, OpenID works similarly – you can sign-in to third-party websites using credentials from popular services like Yahoo and AIM – but both as a user and a developer, the benefits aren’t as tangible as those being offered by Facebook Connect. The remaining advantage for OpenID is that it doesn’t tether users to one service – since so many companies are now identity providers, just about everyone already has an account somewhere they can use on sites that accept OpenID logins.
But, I don’t think that’s enough to hold back Facebook Connect from being a powerful force in identity management, and a must-add feature for websites with social features. It would seem that a lot of big websites already agree, as Facebook has signed on more than 100 launch partners, including CBS, CNET, CNN, Vimeo, and even My.BarackObama.com. And, according to Facebook, early testing of Connect shows a 50 percent increase in engagement on websites that have implemented it.
That’s not to say Facebook isn’t without competition – MySpace has already launched its own similar effort on a number of websites, while Google Friend Connect, likely not as a matter of coincidence, today opened up its doors for any developer to implement. But with its existing and growing lead in social networking, along with an approach that any end-user can understand, Facebook appears to have a big advantage.
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MySpace, Flock and Vidoop have developed OpenID for Flock. I’ll skip the talk about standards which you don’t care about, cut to the chase and tell you what it does.
Now, when you browse with Flock and open a web site that has OpenID support, Flock will collect and manage OpenID credentials, and automatically alert you if you can use a stored OpenID to log into it. You can choose which OpenID you can use to log into a particular site and later view the login history for each OpenID-to-site relationship you’ve created.
Or, if you’d like an even shorter version: Flock now has a password manager for OpenID.
If you’re wondering what MySpace and Vidoop’s role is in this, it’s simple: they’ve helped develop this because they want to ride the open/social/data portability buzzword train. One such buzzword is IDIB (Identity for the Browser), an open source project that is “focused on determining how OpenID in the browser will help OpenID gain overall adoption;” you can find out more about it on the official Google page.
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Inventor and tech-philosopher Dave Winer Twittered tonight that federation is the hot thing, pointing to a New York Times article about Facebook Connect. And just like that he touched upon the third rail of our increasingly social web. The big question facing the social web depends on the direction it needs to take. A sharp increase in the number of web services and social networks has many of us yearning for a single sign-on, which has lead to the idea of “federation.” On the flip side, we also want one place to manage our diverse web services in one place — aggregate. These two diametrically opposed views of how we are going to come to grips with our social web are going to face an intense debate until consumers vote with their clicks.
United Federation of The Social Web
Federation, as explained on Wikipedia, “describes the technologies, standards and use-cases which serve to enable the portability of identity information across otherwise autonomous security domains. The ultimate goal of identity federation is to enable users of one domain to securely access data or systems of another domain seamlessly, and without the need for completely redundant user administration.”
Facebook Connect, which was announced in May 2008 and is being rolled out this week, allows you to use your Facebook login to access Facebook’s partner web sites, then broadcast what you are doing on those sites to everyone on Facebook. It’s like Facebook Beacon — minus the marketing sleaziness. Partners include the Discovery Channel, the (irrelevant) genealogy network Geni, and (hot) video site Hulu.
“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer told The New York Times. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.” Of course, as I pointed out earlier, this is desperately important for the company to figure out how to make money. As a competitive matrix, here are some of other projects Facebook Connect is teeing off against: Google-sponsored Friend Connect, Open ID and MySpace’s Data Availability initiative.
HyperAggregate
On the flip side of federation is aggregation. There’s a small army of startups, such as FriendFeed and Ping.fm, that want to act as a dashboard for your entire social-web infrastructure. The latest startup to join the ranks is Power.com, a Rio de Janiero, Brazil-based startup that has until now operated in stealth and has raised $8 million in venture funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Esther Dyson. The company was started by Steve Vachani.
Vachani’s big idea is that you can come to the Power.com web site, log into and interact with all your social networks, as well as other web services. It is not the first startup of its kind. Several others — MyLifeBrand, Spokeo, Loopster and ProfileLinker — have walked down this road. What Power.com has done is use virality and focus on Orkut to get a big enough user base. Steve describes his service as “Facebook Connect for everything — an ultimate mashup platform” that connects to data from any service and allows Power.com users to interact with that information.
It works like this: You register all your web services and social networks on Power.com. Once you log on, you are automatically logged on everywhere that matters and you can easily go from Power.com to any one of your social networks with a single click. Your start page on Power.com (a stripped-down cross between Facebook’s start page and Netvibes) will show you all of your friends, messages and content — from all their social networks, soon from instant messengers and email accounts — in one place. All your friends, messages, updates, birthdays and photos from diverse social networks will be aggregated nicely together.
A Power “communicator” will allow you to send information to all your friends across networks with the ease of sending an email. “This is just like Meebo,” Steve insisted, where they log in to and constantly interact with the service. It doesn’t use any APIs, and all the magic happens using this technology developed by the company. Steve called it “intelligent proxy.” I have asked for more details to understand how exactly it works.
Power.com claims that all your information is going to be arranged by people not by discrete web destinations. Soon you will be able to use its dashboard to do everything on the web — or so it boldly hints in the press materials. The company claims it has 5 million registered users in Latin America and India and says it will hit 30 million by 2009. How it is claiming all these numbers and growth is a tad fuzzy.
Theoretically (and only theoretically) the idea of aggregating your web content and activites makes a lot of sense. Back in March 2007, in a column for Business 2.0, I wrote: “This is one of the hot opportunities in new new media: hyperaggregation. If aggregation is what we’ve seen so far on YouTube and Flickr, hyperaggregation is aggregating the aggregators…It’s impossible to keep up with dozens of social networks, millions of videos and thousands of blogs. Hyperaggregation is simply a way to do in the new-media world what old media has done for centuries: neatly package information.”
The demo of the service was quite impressive, but there was something about the service that makes me uneasy. Don’t get me wrong — I think they have built an interesting service, but many questions remain before it wins me over.
A Privacy Problem?
First of all, how is this going to turn into a big business? My guess is that our profiles would be used for some kind of marketing. In its terms of service, Power.com says:
You agree that Power may use your image for advertisement purposes. These advertisements will only be displayed to the same user whose image is being used.
Given my distaste for Facebook’s Beacon and other ad-supported efforts, this line makes me pretty queasy. Down in its TOS, Power.com notes that by saying yes to its service agreement, you are authorizing “Power.com to add the URL WEBSITE to my profile, linked to the site My.Power - Power profile of the user.” In other words, they can become your presence on the web, and the company can build a global social directory.
All these issues I would still be able to put aside, but I am not sure I want to aggregate and trust all my private information, including my personal communications (IM messages, emails and what not), to a tiny startup. What assurance is there when it comes to fidelity of my data? I am waiting for Vachani to outline how his company will be able to do that.
Instead, I very much like Loic Le Meur’s concept of “centralized me. “I really like all my services gathered in one place, I would rather that these would be centralized on my blog instead of a third party service,” he wrote. I couldn’t agree more.
Image courtesy of Luic Le Meur
Google has launched an API that allows other websites to provide users with the option to login using their Google Account, in turn eliminating the need for a separate sign-up. The move comes as part of Google’s announcement earlier this year that they would become an identity provider for OpenID, along with Yahoo, Microsoft, and a number of other huge technology companies.
The first big site to allow users to sign in with Google accounts is Zoho. Users of the online office suite can now sign-in to create, collaborate, and share documents all without ever creating an account specifically for Zoho (where you can already sign in using your Yahoo account, btw). At the moment, Google is offering trial access to the APIs for enabling support on your own site. You can apply for access here.
In a blog post, Google writes, “Currently users are required to create individual passwords for many websites they visit, but users would prefer to avoid this step so they could visits websites more easily … If users could log into sites without needing another password, it would allow websites to provide a more personalized experience to their users.” Of course, this is the problem OpenID looks to address, and Google wants to help solve it, so long as the account your using to sign in elsewhere is a Google one.
Similar to the other companies that have embraced OpenID support, Google is simply now one of many identity providers. On the other hand, if you want to login to a Google service like Gmail, Docs, or Reader using OpenID, that is currently not supported. Yahoo’s implementation is quite similar to Google’s, and can be found on services like Plaxo in addition to Zoho.
Yes, a lot of people (and I’m sure most of our readers) have a Google account. But there is a bit of hypocrisy in saying you’re moving to support single sign-on, when in reality, you’re competing with the same old companies to be THE single sign-on provider, as opposed to providing single sign-on access on your own properties too.
Update: Plaxo is also allowing users to sign-in to its service using Google Accounts. You can read more about their implementation on John McCrea’s blog.
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OpenID is an excellent solution for establishing a single identity for all your online accounts, but many people haven’t even tried it yet. For some, the concept of using a URL address for a login ID instead of the traditional email address is still completely foreign.
However, Email to ID could be what the doctor ordered and what these creatures of habits need. It could also be what OpenID needs in order to expedite wide-spread acceptance as the single sign on identity standard. You can now link your email address (or several of them) to your OpenID and then use that email address (any of them) to log into any online service that supports it! The beauty rests in the simplicity of it all. Best of all, it’s all free and easy to do.
First, a little background information on this process
Email to ID is based on the EAUT (Email Address to URL Translation) protocol that allows standard email addresses to be transformed into URLs for services like OpenID. As far as concerns regarding security and who controls everything, EAUT was designed to work in a distributed fashion, so that there isn’t a single authority in charge of everything. Each email service controls how email addresses at their domain are resolved into URLs.
Even though EAUT is designed to be decentralized, it will take time for email providers to add support. In these cases, a fallback service can be used which can translate ANY email address to a URL. Relying parties can use any fallback service they wish, but Email to ID is recommended. The need for a fallback service will decrease as more email providers support EAUT natively.
Why a fallback service like Email to ID?
Emailtoid was designed as a technology prototype to act as a temporary solution to a usability problem in OpenID. Email to ID always defers to the email providers first and only falls back to the local resolution service if the email provider does not support email-to-OpenID resolution.
What’s important for Email to ID’s long-term Success?
There are a couple of things that need to happen in order for Email to ID to become a normal part of our online experience. First, OpenID needs to formally and officially support the EAUT protocol . Second, all email providers need to get on board and support OpenID and EAUT. It’s not only good for their members but for them as well so it’s really a no-brainer. The same is true for all online services and their stance regarding OpenID support - the more services that embrace OpenID, the better for us all.
How to do it
Here’s how easy it is to connect your email address with your OpenID account. It literally takes a couple of minutes. When completed we will show you how to use it with a site that supports EAUT such as Magnolia.
1. First, you’ll need an OpenID account. You might already have one because many services like AIM and LiveJournal include an OpenID for members. You can check here. If you don’t already own one then just create one from any of the official OpenID providers on that page. Popular providers include ClaimID, myOpenID, myVidoop, myID.net and VeriSign’s Personal Identity Provider.
2. Go to Email to ID and add your OpenID account along with the email address you want to associate with it. You can add multiple addresses if you want. You’ll receive an email with an access key you can enter to complete the connection or you can simply click the link in the email. Either way works fine.
That’s it, really. It’s that easy. Enter the email address and OpenID account and they’ll be connected. You can just as easily disconnect them or add another email address or change the OpenID provider should you want to do so. It’s very flexible and puts you in control.
How to use your new email to ID account on a service
Now that you’ve linked your email address with your OpenID account, you can use your familiar email address on any site that supports it. In this example, we’ll use the popular social bookmarking service, Magnolia.
1. Go to the Magnolia sign in page and enter your email address in the OpenID box instead of the usual OpenID URL.
2. You’ll be redirected to a confirmation page on your OpenID provider’s site. Click continue to complete the transaction.
3. That’s it. You’re done. No need to enter tedious profile information or even a password. Just create the screen name you want and the email address and you’re done with the sign-up process in a fraction of the time that it usually takes. Email to ID and OpenID handles all of the dirty work for you.
Final thoughts
You’ve just gotten a glimpse of what could very well be the future of online registration thanks to the OpenID single sign on identity system along with the Email to ID URL translation based on the EAUT protocol. As mentioned earlier, in order for this much improved process to become a common standard and available everywhere online more services need to support OpenID and EAUT. The good news is that increasing new services are in fact supporting OpenID. To keep up with all of the new additions to this list go to the OpenID Directory or subscribe to its RSS feed which updates constantly.
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OpenID support continues to spread throughout the Web ecosystem and new names are added to the list of sites that support OpenID all the time. Since the release of OpenID 2.0, which includes better security features, OpenID has gained major traction as the single sign-on standard. Its biggest benefit being tremendous reduction in the number of login names and passwords that you have to manage. In addition, great time savings when registering at new sites.
Ultimately, all you will ever need is your single OpenID URL or an email address linked to it. Here’s where you can get your own OpenID and all of the sites that support it:
Where Do you Get your own OpenID?
If you have an account at any of the following sites then you might already own an OpenID that you can use anywhere else on the Web that supports it. The format of your OpenID URL will be slightly different from site to site so pick one that’s easiest to remember.
- AOL - openid.aol.com/screenname
- Blogger - blogname.blogspot.com
- Flickr - www.flickr.com/photos/username
- LiveDoor profile.livedoor.com/username
- LiveJournal - username.livejournal.com
- Orange (France Telecom) - http://openid.orange.fr
- SmugMug - username.smugmug.com
- Technorati technorati.com/people/technorati/username
- Vox - member.vox.com
- Yahoo - http://openid.yahoo.com (Every Yahoo ID is now an OpenID 2.0 ID)
- Wikitravel provides an identifier to each registered user
- WordPress.com - username.wordpress.com
Who are OpenID Identity Providers?
If you don’t have an OpenID yet, you can create a free one at any of these 80 and counting OpenID Identity Providers. Keep in mind that these providers all offer different features when it comes to OpenID. Here’s an excellent Guide for OpenID Identity Providers that compares their diverse feature sets.
Below are just some of the most popular OpenID Identity providers:
- ClaimID - One of the most popular OpenID providers
- myOpenID Another popular provider. Hosted OpenID server by JanRain.
- VeriSign’s Personal Identity Provider - Free OpenID Provider with support for multi-factor authentication.
- myID.net - Free OpenID Provider with support for groups and Korean language.
- myVidoop - Free OpenID Provider that eliminates passwords with security features, customization, and browser integration.
- MyLID - Unique because it’s the only identity aggregator as it supports not only OpenID but also LID and Yadis. Thus, your single sign-on such as mylid.net/Paisano would work on any site that supported any of those three identity services. You can also host it yourself by downloading the code here.
Want to Run Your Own OpenID Identity Server?
For you hardcore geeks there’s always the option to host you own OpenID identity Server. Delegation is the simplest way to get up and running with OpenID because it requires nothing more than an OpenID Provider and some basic HTML. OpenID for Developers provides excellent information. You can find additional valuable information at: Plaxo OpenID Recipe and Sam Ruby’s Intertwingly
Who supports OpenID anyway?
The list of sites that support OpenID continues to grow as increasing numbers accept the fact that it’s not going away any time soon and realize that there’s a great demand for it. The good news is that even startups are coming out of the gate supporting OpenID (Blippr, Rejaw, etc.) So, how do you know if a site supports OpenID or not? Just look for the OpenID logo on any sign-up or login page. It’ll always be clearly visible and sometimes even labeled with OpenID. Here’s a sample login screen.
The other thing to check is the MyOpenID OpenID directory that the folks at MyOpenID maintain. There’s also a handy RSS feed that you can subscribe to in Google reader or whatever RSS reader you prefer that’ll let you know whenever a new site has been added to the directory. If you know of a site that is not listed in the OpenID directory then simply send the site’s URL to MyOpenID’s email address for the directory.
Here’s another OpenID directory that also tracks all of the sites that proclaim to support OpenID. This directory is a little different because it allows visitors to vote for their favorite OpenID sites so it’s like digg in that respect. Here are the top voted OpenID Providers.
Here are just some of the sites that support OpenID with many more added all the time:
- Skitch.com - A Web service that gives you 1-click uploading of images for fast image sharing.
- PBWiki - Create a free wiki using your OpenID. It’s as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich.
- LiveJournal - One of the first blogging platforms.
- Drupal - The official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform.
- Mixx - The well-known news site.
- 37Signals - Simple software to help you get organized. Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack are all OpenID enabled.
- Foodio54 - Has a database of over half a million restaurants with reviews.
- ToodLedo - An easy to use Web-based to-do list.
- WetPaint - A popular wiki host.
- Grou.ps- Allows you to create sharing platforms for your social groups
- Jyte - Allows you to make claims about yourself and your friends, give and receive cred and manage your contacts and groups.
Conclusion
OpenID continues to gain support and acceptance. Even the big boys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and AOL have all made the decision to embrace and support it. One of the strongest signs of this acceptance occurred when Microsoft added OpenID support to their own Identity platform called CardSpace. Since OpenID appears to be headed towards becoming the single sign-on standard then it might make sense to give it a look to see what it’s all about.
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There are a lot of websites that require a username and password. Everyone I talk to hates that fact and typically uses the same username and password for each site. Granted security experts will complain loudly about this, but people do not want to complicate their experiences. Who really wants to remember that they have a different username on several sites and every site has a different password? The few people I know that try to have different passwords tend to write them down in a notebook. Obviously, this is not that secure either, but what other choices do we have?
Recently, MySpace announced that they were joining OpenID as a provider. At first glance, most people might read this and say “that’s nice,” and move on to the next story. However, for mainstream Internet users this is fairly important. The multiple usernames and passwords that people have can sometimes be replaced by a single ID using OpenID.
The idea is that you use one of your accounts as your Internet ID. Then other sites that require a logon will redirect you to your OpenID provider to login before allowing you to start your session. This sounds great, right? And you may already have an OpenID available or becoming available in the case of MySpace. The list of OpenID providers includes:
-AOL
-Blogger
-Flickr
-LiveJournal
-Technorati
-Yahoo
-WordPress
When MySpace is added to this list the number of potential users will be much larger. At some point, Google and Microsoft will probably announce support for Google Accounts and MSN accounts as OpenID providers in order to ensure they are not left behind. If they do announce support for these, most US Internet users will have an OpenID account available to them.
What if you already have accounts at various sites that allow OpenID? Well, in most cases you can just attach your OpenID to your existing user account and use it to logon during future visits. There are also sharing options, like sharing photos in Flickr or sharing RSS items from Google Reader. Maybe a site supports OpenID, but some sites want to show what I am sharing from services like Flickr and Reader. How can we control this? There is another option that is available that many aggregation and integration sites are using called OAuth. OAuth describes itself as an open protocol to allow secure API authentication in a simple and standard method from desktop and Web applications.
As you can see from this short description, this is not meant to be used by mainstream Internet users directly. To describe this in regular terms, OAuth does basically the same thing as OpenID, but adds more security around the process. The user process is basically the same as OpenID, a user gets redirected to a site to login and sent back to the page they were initially using. However, the purpose is slightly different. OAuth is trying to have better and more secure integration across various sites. If you use one site to print photos and Flickr to share photos, you need some way to securely share the information.
OAuth is sensitive to users marking things private on various sites, and has specified ways to ensure access is approved and is only temporary. A good developer overview of this is available at the Beginner’s Guide to OAuth Part II. Why is all of this important? This is all important because people are sharing information more than ever before.
There are aggregation sites like FriendFeed that import your public shares from various sites for everyone to view. Websites that allow sharing know that you want to allow access to some of this information to other applications as well. In order to do this in a secure and standard manner, something like OAuth is necessary. What would happen if OAuth was not supported? In the photo sharing example, you would need to provide your Flickr username and password to your photo printing site. Without the standard, there would also be less support for this type of thing because each service integration would require a significant amount of work.
Obviously, both OpenID and OAuth are needed for a better user experience. OpenID solves the problem of having far too many usernames and passwords to remember. OAuth solves the problem of how to share information between sites without giving your password from one site to another. Together the technologies may make things simpler for the user. Thankfully, users do not need to do anything to take advantage of these technologies. The one thing users can do is email the support team of each of your favorite sites and make sure they support OpenID and OAuth.
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The so-called social Web just became legitimately open, as MySpace has launched the two first implementations of its Data Availability initiative on Flixster and Eventful. Simultaneously, the company is announcing that it will support OpenID, allowing its users to sign into any OpenID-enabled website using their MySpace credentials. The move comes one day before Facebook’s developer conference kicks off, where the rival social network is widely expected to announce the first implementations of its own data portability initiative: Facebook Connect.
The implementations of Data Availability on Flixster and Eventful work much as you might expect. On Flixster, users can register using their MySpace credentials, at which point they can import their profile data and connect with any of their friends who already have accounts on Flixster. On Eventful, users can not only import their profile data, but also receive alerts for events coming to their area, based on the artists that the user has friended on MySpace. Hence, if you’re friends with Augustana on MySpace and they are having a concert in your town, you’ll automatically be alerted to it.
All of this information is synced across the Data Availability supporting sites and MySpace. So, if you update your profile, edit your biography, or remove an artist from your friend’s list on MySpace, this will immediately be reflected on Flixster and Eventful. Certain more sensitive data like religion, sexual orientation, and ethnicity are only cahceable for 24 hours by Data Availability partners, while core profile data like age, location, and profile photo can be stored on the third-party site, though still synced with MySpace.
Asked about the distinction between data that is cached and that which is stored, Jim Benedetto, SVP of Technology at MySpace told me: “It’s very technically challenging to rely on MySpace’s server [for accessing all of the data]. [As a user] if I don’t want all information to be available to Flixster, I can revoke access and cut it off. But a core piece of information such as my age, email, first and last name that is key to the initial registration, Flixster can maintain control over so people can continue to login to Flixster with it.”
As for the OpenID initiative, much like other Web giants including Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo that have announced support for the movement, MySpace is only acting as an identity provider, meaning that while you can use your MySpace credentials to sign into other Web sites, you cannot yet use your credentials from another OpenID provider to sign into MySpace. Nonetheless, announcing support for OpenID is another small victory for MySpace over Facebook, and keeps the pressure on the latter to legitimately open up.
MySpace first announced Data Availability in May, with launch partners Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket. Asked about the status of these higher profile rollouts, Benedetto told me that “All of them are currently working on their implementations. Flixster and Eventful are just smaller companies that were able to move very quickly using our APIs to get them live.”
As for Facebook, they announced Connect with Digg signed on to support the initiative one day after MySpace kicked off Data Availability back in May. Google also has its own hat in the ring in the battle to become your universal profile with its Google Friend Connect offering.
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Zoho has announced that its suite of web-based office tools is now not only open to its own registered membership, but also to registered users of both Google and Yahoo services as well.
Indeed, Zoho isn’t picking favorites among the top two Web giants. Current and prospective users now have the option to log in to the company’s litany of applications either with Google or Yahoo IDs, opening itself to a potential client base of hundreds of millions of individuals. Suffice to say that Google Apps fans, given the option, will be very much inclined to reach out to Zoho for things like its wiki creation utility, CRM solution, and Web conferencing software. Yahoo users, too, may find similar interest in testing the suite for themselves.
Zoho presents its reasoning for the transition as twofold:
- Many users don’t prefer creating yet another account for yet another online app
- Users prefer Zoho to competition when they try both (In case of the above poll, around 75% prefer Zoho)
There’s definite credence to this logic, yet this shift to a more open platform, in terms of access, behooves us to question when precisely Zoho will support OpenID, which seems an almost inevitable development, given recent reports of entities like Yahoo and SourceForge pledging at least partial allegiance to OpenID. For the moment, however, Zoho’s bridges to Google and Yahoo users alike will presumably grow its fortunes considerably in the months ahead.mashable109:http://mashable.com/2008/05/14/zoho-openid/
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Blogger’s OpenID Support Now Official
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Blogger Beta Gets OpenID Support
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