One big social network
Jul. 9th, 2009 04:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenBack when I was with Heise, I signed up with Digg and Reddit which I'd only previously been reading, so that I could promote Heise stories there occasionally.
But recently, I noticed an interesting new feature on Digg: Facebook Connect. For a laugh, I enabled it, and as a result, it automatically populated my Digg profile with all the relevant bits of info from my FB one: name, photo, age, sex, location, stuff like that. This saved me a lot of work.
Over the years, I have got really tired of filling in all my contact info on multiple different websites. I must have put in my contact info approaching a thousand times. This is a distinct step in the right direction, I think. But still, I need lots of accounts.
I have accounts on things like Blogger which I created solely for commenting to others' posts; I don't keep a blog there and don't plan to. That itself is getting less necessary, though, because more and more blogs accept things like a LJ ID or a Google ID or an OpenID to let you comment as yourself.
(Although recently I had my first OpenID error - I tried to use my LJ, which has hitherto been my primary OpenID, and the site rejected it, saying it was a v1.0 ID and I needed a v2 one. Great. A return to the PITA that was RSS 1 vs. RSS 2 vs. Atom and all that nonsense.)
One of the last times I re-entered all my info was to create a Google Profile. Mine is here. To my disappointment, it doesn't seem to show up in Google results.
But now, there are mutterings that Google will make all Gmail/Google Docs accounts OpenIDs, meaning millions of new ones. I wonder if this will also include automatically populating profile info from your Google Profile?
This is quite exciting stuff. It could mean you could roam from any social networking type site to any other using a single profile which would follow you everywhere. If you are not one of the poor deluded types who thinks that calling yourself GreenSquirrel on Lj means you've hidden your identity, then this could be terrific. A massive timesaver and a step toward linking all the different sites and accounts in the world together. I love the idea.
I bet there are going to be screams and howls of protest, though...
But recently, I noticed an interesting new feature on Digg: Facebook Connect. For a laugh, I enabled it, and as a result, it automatically populated my Digg profile with all the relevant bits of info from my FB one: name, photo, age, sex, location, stuff like that. This saved me a lot of work.
Over the years, I have got really tired of filling in all my contact info on multiple different websites. I must have put in my contact info approaching a thousand times. This is a distinct step in the right direction, I think. But still, I need lots of accounts.
I have accounts on things like Blogger which I created solely for commenting to others' posts; I don't keep a blog there and don't plan to. That itself is getting less necessary, though, because more and more blogs accept things like a LJ ID or a Google ID or an OpenID to let you comment as yourself.
(Although recently I had my first OpenID error - I tried to use my LJ, which has hitherto been my primary OpenID, and the site rejected it, saying it was a v1.0 ID and I needed a v2 one. Great. A return to the PITA that was RSS 1 vs. RSS 2 vs. Atom and all that nonsense.)
One of the last times I re-entered all my info was to create a Google Profile. Mine is here. To my disappointment, it doesn't seem to show up in Google results.
But now, there are mutterings that Google will make all Gmail/Google Docs accounts OpenIDs, meaning millions of new ones. I wonder if this will also include automatically populating profile info from your Google Profile?
This is quite exciting stuff. It could mean you could roam from any social networking type site to any other using a single profile which would follow you everywhere. If you are not one of the poor deluded types who thinks that calling yourself GreenSquirrel on Lj means you've hidden your identity, then this could be terrific. A massive timesaver and a step toward linking all the different sites and accounts in the world together. I love the idea.
I bet there are going to be screams and howls of protest, though...
