Manage your online identity.

If you follow the identity space, it’s likely you’ve encountered the work of Chris Messina.  A longtime advocate of open standards and sane identity solutions, Mr. Messina’s influence was felt very early on in the ClaimID development process.  In fact, we owe him a lot of thanks for helping us think through the possibilities of many very new technologies.

For these reasons, we’re following Chris’ work on DiSo – Distributed Social Networking Applications.   He’s working with Will Norris and Steve Ivy to create a framework for applications that leverages open identity standards – OpenID, the emergent OAuth.  This framework will ensure distributed, trustworthy data and identity portability between applications, ensuring what some might call distributed social networking.

In the past few months, there’s been much talk about this idea of distributed social networking: Google’s super-standard OpenSocial, Facebook’s Platform – we’re seeing the possibilities (and the downsides) of opening up our stacks.  Of course, to the major players, this is a new land-grab; this is why Messina and co’s approach is so attractive.  Our data, the stuff that I choose to share, should be free and portable.

Needless to say, we’re paying close attention to the work on OAuth and DiSo – hopefully in a few weeks we’ll have some interesting announcements regarding our brainstorming for feature development using these new methods.  This is very powerful stuff, and we’re glad to see it coming to life.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 13th, 2007 at 2:19 pm and is filed under API, OpenID, claimID.