Portable Identity

Description

Dion Hinchcliffe:

"Having a single, chosen online identity has become the holy grail of the social Web in some circles for years now. Fortunately, it’s fast become a reality, whether that’s for logging in to Web sites (the approaches include OpenID, Facebook Connect, and Google Accounts) or for directly accessing the data that you own at a site (OAuth and OAuth WRAP). All of these approaches made major headway in 2009 and are poised for mainstream use in 2010. For those building Web sites or using social media tools, these standards will be the stamp of approval. The social graph is also becoming more portable and despite fairly unsuccessful attempts to standardize this up until now new attempts such as Portable Contacts may have more success this year with backing from Google and influential figures from the open Web community including Chris Messina and Joseph Smarr. There are also efforts emerging, such as WebFinger, to make metadata about people more open and easily obtainable instead of relying on profile pages on proprietary social networking services or poorly supported microformats. A few semi-proprietary yet popular social metadata services have thrived as well and will continue to be grow in importance this year. A good example is the Gravatar service, which lets users define how their user profile picture looks, and is then pulled in from whatever social media tools they interact with later on. This gives users one single place to control their visual representation across the Web." (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=1152)

Examples

• for logging in to Web sites: Open ID, Facebook Connect, and Google Accounts
• for directly accessing the data that you own at a site: OAuth and OAuth WRAP