MySpace Joins Share Identity Alliance - OpenID

Social Networking giant, MySpace has announced that they will be supporting OpenID to allow their users to take their identities to other OpenID supporting sites. For those who don’t know about OpenID, it’s a shared identity service which enables internet users to use the same digital identity across various other internet services. OpenID is free and decentralized, and will eliminate the necessity to use different usernames and passwords across various websites.

MySpace will only be a “provider”, which means users can use their MySpace account to log into other services which accept OpenID logins (”relying” website). For example, Yahoo is also an OpenID provider, but MySpace users can’t log into Yahoo using their MySpace account. Senior VP for Technology, Jim Benedetto says that he is not against the idea of letting users log into MySpace using OpenIDs from other providers, which would make MySpace as a relying party.

When the project is implemented, every MySpace will get OpenID by default. Unless the use their OpenID somewhere else, they won’t notice any change.

MySpace has also announced two implementations of their data availability concept. As per the implementation, MySpace profile data can be seamlessly imported to user accounts in Eventful and Flixter.

Both these announcements prove that MySpace wants to be recognized as an identity hug. Good to see major players like MySpace join the Open Identity platform.