Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Identity Wars and Joseph Smarr

I remember Mr. Smarr's talk about OpenID and OAuth from a couple of years ago.  I got the impression that his biggest fear was that Facebook would always be a walled garden.  For reasons I don't quite understand, perhaps a sort of social consciousness (no pun intended), Facebook has opened their platform up, albeit in a limited and proprietary way.

Fortunately, there are companies like Google and JanRain who are hiding the differences between the Open Stack and Facebook's APIs.  First, let's have a look at the Open Stack proper.

JanRain has RPX, and Google has FriendConnect, so using the OpenID/OAuth stuff is easy without really knowing a lot.  What is needed is a way to marry the existing authentication stacks of all the common web platforms (ASP.NET, PHP, etc.) with the Open Stack, I think.

For more information, here are some blogs:

  • TheSocialWeb.tv
  • JosephSmarr.com
  • TheRealMcCrea.com