Twitter is Becoming an OpenID Provider De Facto, Sort of

אוקטובר 21st, 2008

Twitter is becoming an OpenID provider de facto, sort of. You must think i've gone mad, or crazy, or that i've just lost my mind.

How is that possible, you may ask, we didnt hear anything about it, and openid has years of R&D yet to come before it becomes somthing for the common people.

What is OpenID?
OpenID is a shared identity service, which allows Internet users to log on to many different web sites using a single digital identity, single sign-on, eliminating the need for a different user name and password for each site. OpenID is a decentralized, free and open standard that lets users control the amount of personal information they provide. (from Wikipedia)

Well, in today's social media market everyone's talking about being open, leaving the walled garden paradigm behind, making all most data available to the users and more social media new age shit. What's actually happening is that there's a race to beat each other on the Techcrunch/Mashable/GigaOm/NYTimes front technology page. Companies show off with their "openness". We are still not in the "open" era.

what does Twitter has to do with all of that?
Well, Twitter, with it's TOTALLY open API, enabled 3rd party applications to connect to it, making information travel both in and out of the system. With this, Twitter has become what Google and Facebook are- those are two companies that created new markets around them: Google, almost single handedly, created the SEO/SMO market, and Facebook created the Facebook applications market. Now came Twitter and did the same, giving their API to the public, and without creating an eco system (like Facebook), created a new market (like what Google had done).

OpenID, where?
I just came across a service called StockTwits over at Mashable. I went to their site and saw that I don't need to register. All I need to do is just sign in with my Twitter name as I've done in one or two more services that help me post twits to Twitter. Well, this time it was different. Whereas other services help me post to Twitter (no registering- just a Twitter sign in), this service stands on its own, and all the conversations there are about stock exchange. In other words, they filtered Twitter to this topic, and created an entire "new" community using the Twitter user database as a point of refference, and this is how Twitter became an OpenID provider de facto, sort of.

Niv Calderon

Social Media | User Experience | Niv Calderon

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Twitter is Becoming an OpenID Provider De Facto, Sort of

אוקטובר 21st, 2008