[OpenID] Combining Google & Yahoo user experience research

[Martin Atkins]

Chris Messina wrote:
> 
> This is called "identity consolidation". It's represented in XFN as 
> rel-me links (see the source of factoryjoe.com <http://factoryjoe.com> 
> for an example). Portable Contacts also provides links like this... 
> eventually there will be some value in having trusted "identity graph 
> providers" that can validate a number of identifiers for someone (phone, 
> URL, email, etc). DandyID.org is working on this, and it's something 
> we're already looking at/doing in DiSo.
> 

rel="me" itself obviously can only work for an identifier that can be 
dereferenced to an HTML document, but I'd agree that you could infer 
similar semantics given an email-to-URL mapping reciprocated by a rel="me".

Again. the problem comes down to the email-to-URL mapping rather than 
anything else. It seems that this is the crucial piece.

All of this is moot unless this can have widespread deployment across 
RPs, though. I don't want a hypothetical consolidation system that only 
works on one or two sites. This is something that OpenID-for-XRI is 
currently doing a lot better than OpenID-for-HTTP, XRI support itself 
notwithstanding.