:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 ::

OpenID

This is interesting. I wrote a post about the need for an open system and API for social networking back in March (see point 4) and guessed that someone must be working on it somewhere. It seems [via dev/null] that LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick is on the case, with OpenID. Although there are obvious privacy concerns about what information is held about you and where, especially if you actively wanted to keep different groups of friends linked to different accounts / aliases. Hopefully a robust set of rules can be written into it that might help to control aggregation sites like Spock and PeekYou, as Grom criticised last week. The biggest issue I have with these is the lack of control they give you over what information they collect about you. For example, PeekYou has scrapped my Blogger, LinkedIn and Flickr profiles together, which I'm not entirely happy about but can live with, somehow has failed to find my Facebook or MySpace, and has linked the wrong eBay account. Now, I'm not jumping to add the missing data, but I would obviously like to be able to remove the incorrect data. Having said that, there are data uses I wouldn't mind, especially having copied and pasted the same basic profile information into Blogger, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook, and rarely editing any of them, a simple "would you allow us to copy data from xx" dialogue during sign-up and one central point where changes cascade down would be very handy. But the user must have control over what data is taken from where.

Here's the link to dev/null's post again. I recommend reading the whole post if you skipped past the link previously.

Labels: Blogger, facebook, Flickr, FOSS, ID, myspace, OpenID, SocialNetworking

:: Dan 21.8.07 [Arc] [0 comments] [links to this post]    ::
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