MySpace falls into Google's OpenID arms
Social-networking drama continues this week as MySpace plights its open-identification troth to Google Friend Connect. It also announced a name change for its own universal-login system.
The announcement came on the heels of news from both Facebook and Google that their respective OpenID systems are out of beta.
MySpace's choice of partnership was not, to be frank, so unexpected. The industry would be much more surprised if MySpace had cast its lot with the other bit data-portability effort launched last week -- Facebook Connect. it would also be something of a shock had Google turned away MySpace as a gesture of solidarity with, say, Orkut, its own social-networking effort.
The project flows along the usual OpenID lines: MySpace users visiting partner sites can log in with their MySpace IDs, with the service handling authentication and data-passing behind the scenes. Info from the partner site -- for instance, scores from an online game -- could in turn be displayed back on the user's MySpace page via the Post-To-MySpace functionality. It all falls under the MySpace Open Platform umbrella.
MySpace and Google have actually worked together on OpenID-related matters for quite some time; MySpace uses Google's advertising and search operations, and the two sites combined last year on OpenSocial. Most observers feel that having the two services band together using OpenSocial, OAuth, OpenID and the like is apt to be a thumb in the eye to systems that revolve around proprietary standards, as Facebook does -- assuming, some developers grouse, that someone, somewhere, somehow can improve the implementation process.
The name change is also not so surprising, considering that the login service name "Data Availability" contained neither the word "my" nor the word "space." That oversight has been rectified, and the project, which was announced in May as "Data Availability," will now be known as "MySpaceID."
MySpaceID also announced two partnerships, with the European telco Vodafone and with the popular home-page personal aggregator Netvibes. Going forward, company officials have indicated that MySpaceID could be a factor in finding some sort of non-advertising-based profitability for the service, perhaps as a payment-processing system. At the LeWeb 08 conference in Paris this week, MySpace COO Amit Kapur confirmed, "We are looking at some kind of wallet system."