overstimulate

Identity Burro + OpenID

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 comments
Paolo's latest post about Identity Burro, talks about the possibility of using OpenID as a method for tieing together various ids you have on social sites (flickr, del.icio.us, ...)

These technologies seem like they would compliment each other perfectly but, alas, the mapping appears to be the inverse of what we need.

Problem statement: Given a username on a site 1, link to user's account on site 2.

There seems to be 2 solutions, one more complete than the other.
  1. Centralized solution - develop a service, idmapper.org, that takes returns a list of usernames on other sites when given a id on any other site.
  2. Distributed solution - people can embed their information on their homepage, which can be mined by a greasemonkey script. If I want to know Paolo's del.icio.us, flickr, 43thigns, ... I need to visit his homepage and grab his list.


Of course these two solutions can be combined. The data for the centralized server that maps flickr accounts to del.icio.us accounts can grab it's information from the embedded data provided for the distributed solution. This seems to be where OpenID is applicable.
your profiile is your identity URL, but recipients of your identity can then learn more about you from any public, semantically interesting documents linked thereunder (FOAF, RSS, Atom, vCARD, etc.).

So we have a OpenID point to a list of name/service accounts. Then perhaps we can mine them either using search engines or allowing users to add them. (or even have a greasemonkey script that submits them to the central service whenever it finds one - ala Jeff Barr's Syndic8 Feed Finder. Then we have a service that can map between social accounts.

Am I missing something?

Responses to "Identity Burro + OpenID"

  1. Thu, 01 Sep 2005 paolo says:
  2. Thu, 15 Sep 2005 Anonymous says:
    You should also check out LID. It does most of this already. http://lid.netmesh.org

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Jesse Andrews
open source, web browsers, web services, web sites & folk dancing. contacts/sites

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