OpenID and interrelating services
The Ping.fm Beta Robot sent me a beta sign up code. I thought i’d fiddle with it for a few days to find out whether it would work for me. It provides a method by which one can update multiple “status” conditions as well as micro/blog in multiple places. I’ve been using twitter to that effect as the spatial services try to post to twitter and twitter posts to facebook (but the broke IM support seems to thwart that at times).
I went to set up my identi.ca site in ping.fm and found the connecting tool doesn’t support OpenID. I’ve run into this problem with Facebook apps, in particular the explode.us application, in the past.
Is it a lack of will? I’d wondered with the Explode.us account whether it was just too few users to bother to implement in the facebook app. It turns out, it’s not a lack of will, but a usecase not supported in the design of OpenID. From the GetSatisfaction discussion:
To answer your OpenID questions: There is no secure way to establish an OpenID session through Ping.fm. This is because OpenID requires you sign in at the ID server of the site you want to login to. You can’t login to a website with an OpenID on other than the site you are requesting (i.e. Identi.ca). We will soon support OpenID for Ping.fm as account representation, but there is no way currently to connect third party sites through a Ping.fm OpenID login.
A quick search for ping and twitter on the OpenID site didn’t turn up any discussions, but i surely wasn’t looking in the right place. It may be the level of trust one shows when cross-linking services like twitter and ping and facebook just isn’t a level of trust OpenID is prepared to support.
July 24th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I think this is what the OAuth protocol would be for, if both parties supported it.
July 24th, 2008 at 9:12 pm
@Dave Indeed! I read in the spec “OAuth does not require a specific user interface or interaction pattern, nor does it specify how Service Providers authenticate Users, making the protocol ideally suited for cases where authentication credentials are unavailable to the Consumer, such as with OpenID.”
Very cool. Thank you.