Plaxo With Sauce: PIM Site Now Supporting OpenID And Microformats
Plaxo is the latest high profile web service to announce support for OpenID, the standard for online identity management. Plaxo’s recently unveiled beta of Plaxo 3.0 has been updated to offer support for OpenID and the company says it plans to become an OpenID provider in the near future.
In addition to the OpenID support, Plaxo is now encoding contact and event information in the microformats hCard and hCal in an effort to both improve the site’s ease-of-use and raise the profile of microformats.
Both OpenID, which is a decentralized single sign-on system that enables you to securely use the same login information across multiple sites, and microformats, which are standards-based markup formats that wrap calendar events, contact information and more in code which allows them to be easily shared with other services, are fast becoming de rigueur for web platform services.
For a reasonably complete list of sites that support microformats see the official microformats wiki and if you haven’t already set yourself up with an OpenID account, be sure to check out our earlier guide (note that while we specifically looked at ways to use your own domain as an OpenID provider, you don’t need a domain to take advantage of OpenID).
As part of the release, Plaxo has also published a handy guide for other developers looking to support OpenID logins on their sites.
Plaxo joins other high profile companies like AOL, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and others who support the OpenID standard. In a press release Plaxo writes that “open standards that have blossomed out of the user-advocate community, we hope to accelerate the emergence of a truly open social web.”
