Now, OpenID identity in browser

REDWOOD CITY, USA: MySpace, Flock and Vidoop today announced that they have developed OpenID for Flock, an implementation of the broader Identity in Browser (IDIB) open source project. OpenID for Flock offers the most comprehensive discovery and management capabilities for OpenID currently available. Internet users can now not only store their existing identity credentials within their browser, but also reap the benefits of better discovery when OpenIDs are made available by the sites they are visiting. OpenID for Flock is now available to all Flock 2.0 users as an alpha extension available for download at https://extensions.flock.com and http://vidoop.com/labs/.

With OpenID for Flock, the process of discovering, configuring and using OpenIDs that allow the user to log onto website accounts and manage their identity is streamlined. Once a relationship is established between OpenIDs and the sites that can rely on them for authentication, an easy, seamless experience is created for users that frequently travel to multiple destinations across the Internet.

"We are three companies dedicated to helping people better share their content and experiences online, and we saw an opportunity to collaborate to quickly create a way for users to more easily manage their online identity," said Max Engel, product lead for the MySpace Data Availability Platform. "Our goal was to eliminate some of the work involved in jumping between social experiences on the Web. The extension we jointly developed will give the community an easier way to seamlessly carry their identity and preferences in their browser."

MySpace, Flock and Vidoop jointly developed OpenID for Flock because the browser is the common application used by everyone to make the connection between both OpenID providers and sites that support login using the OpenID standard. Vidoop was the catalyst behind the original Identity In Browser (IDIB) project. The collaboration started in October 2008 when Vidoop Labs produced a fledgling prototype of IDIB, shared the code with the community, and blogged about the need for online identity to be solved at the browser level. MySpace became involved because of their commitment to OpenID via the company’s Data Availability Platform and Flock contributed their browser expertise based on their commitment to OpenID and furthering usability.

While other OpenID browser extensions exist, they do not provide the OpenID discovery capabilities and management features that OpenID for Flock provides. For example, OpenID for Flock senses when a user lands on a site that has provided them with an OpenID, allows configuration, management and usage tracking of all OpenIDs the user has collected, and provides a visual alert when a stored OpenID can be used to log onto a site. Users can choose which of their OpenIDs they wish to log in for each site and view the login history for each OpenID-to-site relationship they have created. With this technology, users may now more easily traverse the web, experience many more sites and leverage more connections using only one credential for each site.

OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. IDIB is an emerging follow-on project that is focused on determining how OpenID in the browser will help OpenID gain overall adoption, and realize the better security and ubiquity that OpenID can provide. The MySpace, Flock and Vidoop implementation is a reference design released as open source under GPL, and as such, modifications by developers will be brought together and shared with the wider open source developer community. Details on the IDIB project and OpenID for Flock are available at the project’s Google group page located at http://code.google.com/p/idib/.