More Social Features by MySpaceID

A long time has passed since MySpace announced support for OpenID last summer. But the wait is over, MySpace is an OpenID Provider now.

Well, MySpace announced this as part of MySpaceID, an effort to provide users with a similar experience as Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. In combination with OAuth, MySpace members can use their MySpace login details to log in to other sites, import their profiles and activities to those sites. Here’s an example of a login at AOL:

On AOL‘s frontpage users have the option to sign in with their MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, or AIM accounts.

Of course, I tried MySpace. Next appears a popup window where I have to provide my email address and MySpace password.

In Safari 4 the browser’s address bar is not visible (I omitted this from the screenshot as well, though). This will hopefully change as users could easily be phished if they don’t see that they are actually on MySpace.

After closing the window I have access to my MySpace profile from within AOL:

By the way, AOL also allows users to import their mails from other providers like Gmail. Works smoothly with OAuth as well. Well done!

If you think a MySpace OpenID only works as part of MySpaceID, here’s an example of a login to Twitterfeed:

This works well, though there is no popup window this time. The user experience should be consistent on all sites, I think.

It’s great to have one of the most popular social networks support OpenID. However, currently MySpace is only an OpenID Provider, so you can’t log in to MySpace with another OpenID. Just like Yahoo! and Google, MySpace only supports OpenID 2.0, so users can’t log in to all OpenID enabled websites.