Today was a big day for OpenID, a single identity framework, given its anouncement that Yahoo is joining OpenID. OpenID is an admirable effort which aims to provide a centralized Identity system for authentication which can be used by any web site. You can read about the details if you are new to OpenID. Now that Yahoo has decided to join it, it means that the almost 250 million user accounts which are present in the Yahoo database are now part of OpenID, which consequently, means that the almost 9,000 sites that have implemented OpenID can now be simply accessed with one’s Yahoo account. Of course, it’s a big ease for Yahoo users since they won’t have to create a new account for a new service they want to access. Note, that there have been rumors that Google is also thinking of becoming a part of it. Can there be any better news for OpenID?
Recently, there was also news that Facebook is joining DataPortability, which allows for the personal information of users to be portable to another service which also implements the same open standard. While Facebook has made us realize the importance of the social graph, it was still a closed garden which didn’t allow any data to go out allowing only varied applications which could be run only inside Facebook. In the words of dataportability: “(Aim is) actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.“
So, in a perfect and best case scenario, a user would need only one identity and his social information around it would be portable anywhere on the web and can be used by any service or widget or application. And this possiblity is much closer now with these two events that happened in 2008. Now, both OpenID and DataPortability are open standards and therefore, users would be much more willing and less fidgety about privacy issues. But of course, I highly suspect that everything would work perfectly from the point of view of the user. Note that services like
Mybloglog arose because of a need for distributed identity which could be carried anywhere. Now with OPen identity and open social graph with info, much richer services than these can be launched. Of course details and services are a matter of pure speculation and I am also sure that many people are thinking about it. But what do you think? Comment up!!
Tags:
dataportability, Facebook, Open Source, openid
