I have been playing close attention of late to the rapid proliferation of the various portable identity services. I now look to see if it's implemented on any site I visit, and if so, which ones it uses and how it uses them.
Examples of these portable identity services include Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. These allow a visitor to log-in to the site using his/her Facebook or Google credentials and identity. Any activity or interaction on that site gets associated with this identity (name and avatar mostly), and with an opt-in by the visitor, that activity shows up back on Facebook or other social networks. The images below illustrate this.
In addition to Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect,
there is Twitter-based login using the OAuth API. This movement is
taking a big leap forward now based upon LinkedIn's new platform and
two dueling announcements yesterday.
LinkedIn now offers a similar portable identity service using its own implementation of OAuth. Since it became available last Monday, I've been seeking examples of sites that have implemented it, and found one today. NutshellMail, a nice service that aggregates summaries of activities among various social graphs in one e-mail, seems to use this to allow connection with a LinkedIn network.
Yesterday, Facebook and Yahoo rolled out the ability for visitors to Yahoo to login using Facebook Connect. An impact of this is for people in my social graph on Facebook to know what I'm searching for using Yahoo (if I choose to let them know) -- adding another dimension to social search. On the same day, Google added the ability for users of its Friend Connect service to login using Twitter OAuth, the first time I've seen two portable identity services mashed together.
I'm not one for predictions, but I believe this is going to explode in 2010 and take the impact of social media to another level. In particular, I think we'll start to see more B2B company sites implement these services, as they make it much easier to build communities, particularly leveraging the LinkedIn platform, integrating together activity on company sites with the "outposts" companies have set up through LinkedIn Groups, etc.
How are you thinking about this?
