Category Archives: Microformats

Public nuisance #1: Importing your contacts

I’ve talked about this before (as one of the secondary motivators behind OAuth) but I felt it deserved a special call out.
Recently, Simon Willison presented on OpenID and called the practice that Dopplr (and many many others) uses to import your contacts from Gmail absolute horrifying. I would concur, but point out that Dopplr [...]

Data portability and thinking ahead to 2008

So-called data portability and data ownership is a hot topic of late, and with good reason: with all the talk of the opening of social networking sites and the loss of presumed privacy, there’s been a commensurate acknowledgment that the value is not in the portability of widgets (via OpenSocial et al) but instead, (as [...]

hCard for OpenID Simple Registration and Attribute Exchange

One of the many promises of OpenID is the ability to more easily federate profile information from an identity provider to secondary consumer applications. A simple example of this is when you fill out a basic personal profile on a new social network: if you’ve ever typed your name, birthday, address and your dog’s name [...]