[OpenID] About Facebook, MySpace and OpenID

[Peter Williams]

"For social networking sites keeping the users bound their network is of primary importance." [santrajan]


This is the opposite goal of UCI and openid, which aims/aimed to free a user's identifiers/identities (and attributes) from RPs/OPs through the principle of portability. Use any OP while it's doing a good job in your estimation, but be assured through technology standards that said business has no ability to erect any barrier when you opt to migrate or share your identity data. If you unsubscribe from them, there was to have been no material impact on you if you made that free choice. That is: it is User centric identity (vs OP centric or RP centric, like the competing standards based around SAML).

Public social networking sites (vs sites engaging in B2B reciprocals) compete amongst themselves and cannot really be expected to allow their subscribers to use the openid feature of delegating to a competitor's OP. Or can they? Surely that feature will be quietly "not implemented".

UCI says they should; but it seems a stretch that any will do it in the next year or 2.

But social networking OPs are not the only game in town. The openid movement has to be multi-year and bigger than the mega-portals as OP, just like SSL evolved to be VERY much bigger than VeriSign. By having the room to grow, whole new areas of SSL evolved ...and innovation is still rampant 10+ years later.