Your MySpace Profile Is an OpenID

MySpace is certainly one of the most popular social networks worldwide. So it is really exciting to see the company adopting OpenID. Yes, MySpace is an OpenID Provider since this week. It announced possible support for the technology last summer already, but didn’t implement it until this week.

The OpenID support is part of MySpaceID, a strategy of the company to become more open, letting members log in to other sites with their MySpace login credentials and have their friends and activities from MySpace on those sites as well. If you’re familiar with Facebook Connect product, you’ll get the picture.

As you have probably guessed already, MySpace is only an OpenID Provider now, not a Relying Party that accepts other OpenIDs. That’s kind of sad but on the other hand, MySpace users are familiar with the concept of a URL representing themselves. It’s not some strange and mysterious thing to them. So this might drive OpenID adoption even more.

However if you intend using your MySpace OpenID you should keep in mind a thing or two:

• MySpace only supports the OpenID 2.0 specification. So you won’t be able to log in to sites that haven’t upgraded yet.
• As far as I can see, MySpace doesn’t support the Simple Registration extension (see the Technical Terms for more information about it), so you have to fill forms manually on new sites.
• I have tested it with various Relying Parties and was unable to log in to all of them. Some Relying Parties didn’t recognized it as an OpenID.

I am not sure who’s responsible for the latter problem, MySpace or the Relying Party, but it will hopefully be resolved. Until then try your MySpace OpenID and see if it works for you.