MySpace Makes Big Announcement the Day Before Facebook Developer Conference – OpenID Support

Mere hours after Michael Arrington reported that his sources suggested that MySpace would roll out support of OpenID some time later this week, the rumors have been confirmed officially in a press release. And it would have been strange not to expect a big announcement from MySpace the day before Facebook’s developer conference, right?

So initially MySpace will serve as an issuer of login credentials for its users (so that their MySpace URLs can be used as logins for other sites that support OpenID login) and at a later stage it could be possible that MySpace will allow users to log in using credentials issued by other providers - without any promises as to when we could expect such a possibility.

In addition to OpenID support, MySpace is also announcing news related to its much discussed Data Availability program: two sites, Eventful and Flixter are officially joining the program today. For the end user it means that there’s no more need to create and update profiles and add all the same friends on these two sites- provided that they have all that information on MySpace already.

Rafe Needleman argues that both announcements are far from perfect since they are “one way” because MySpace is still supposed to serve as a central hub for everything. But I believe users will be very enthusiastic even as it is. I’d rather have a central hub (and if MySpace is ready to serve as such a hub for all other sites, I promise to finally recover my password and start using the network) for it to send my information and friends everywhere than have to update everything everywhere constantly. It is not truly portable but it is better limited than nothing.