Austin, Texas — MySpace, the world’s dominant social portal, today unveiled plans to enhance its data portability system with new functionality for MySpaceID, a product that will make it easier for users and developers alike to access the MySpace social graph, enabling any user to securely link their profile, friends, and activities with their favorite websites from around the web.
MySpaceID already allows members to access their profile data to from external sites, so that they do not have to re-enter it, as well as discover which of their MySpace friends have accounts with those sites that participate in the MySpaceID system.
Starting today, MySpace will announce its integrated support for the open standards OAuth and OpenID, for single sign-on and user authentication, with MySpaceID.
MySpaceID also introduced developer access to MySpace user activity streams and a seamless authentication experience for sites across the web as well as a new developer work-flow and MySpaceID SDKs.
“We have had APIs for ways of associating and linking accounts, but we had not offered true single sign-on experience,” said Max Engel, product lead for MySpaceID.
Also beginning today, MySpace announced a MySpaceID implementation, currently in limited testing on the new Yahoo! homepage. Users can check out the MySpaceID integration on Yahoo’s homepage. This release, which we previewed a few weeks ago, follows up on previous MySpaceID features that let users access their MySpace profile data and find MySpace friends on other sites.
The service’s novel features could make the entertainment-focused social network more applicable to more people, at a time when the company’s traffic is stagnating and management is turning over.
“By signing into MySpace from the new App right on the Yahoo! homepage, users get quick access to their MySpace friend updates, friend requests, and can manage their MySpace status, mood and more — all the while catching up on their other activities on Yahoo!,” said Jason Oberfest, senior vice president of business development and general manager of the MySpace Open Platform. “By working with Yahoo! we have been able to take a big step forward in evolving the open Web–we are very pleased to be working with them.”
With these improvements “We have taken OpenID and OAuth, together into a hybrid experience, and then bundled it all in a pop-up [interface]. There is been a stigma around these technologies in the past, that OpenID cannot have a good user experience, that there is no way to roll out these open technologies and do it in a way that users understand. Here, we are demonstrating that openness and elegant design are not mutually exclusive,” he added. “That is a huge part of this.”
The company is also releasing a test version of a software development kit designed to also make it easier for developers to build MySpaceID applications. Initially it will have client libraries in the PHP, Python, Ruby, .NET and Java programming languages.
By allowing users to connect their MySpace account, sites can enable social functionality:
- Register on partner sites using his or her MySpace credentials (New Today)
- View MySpace friend updates on partner sites (New Today)
- Publish MySpace activities to friends on partner websites (New Today)
- Discover MySpace friends on a partner site (Available)
- Connect MySpace profile data to partner sites (Available)
- Provide a dashboard that allows users to have a window into their life on MySpace (Available)
In addition to these currently available features, MySpaceID now allows members to broadcast their profiles’ activity streams to external sites, while giving the participating sites the option to select which types of actions they will show, such as photos or music, while filtering out others that may not fit in with their focus.
For more information on MySpaceID please visit: http://www.myspace.com/MySpaceID.
The new Yahoo! homepage is currently being tested by a small percentage of Yahoo! users in advance of a public beta, and more information is available at: http://ycorpblog.com/2009/02/13/update-on-our-new-homepage-testing/.
“We believe MySpace users should be in control of their personal and portable social identity whenever they travel online,” said Max Engel, product lead for MySpaceID. “MySpaceID offers developers and Websites a package where they can pick and choose the functionality and features they want to implement on their site — all built on open standards which ensure compatibility and provide access to continued community innovation.”
MySpace claims it to be a big milestone, however, it is not yet clear how much MySpaceID could help users, but this seems like a step in the right direction.