The social networking giant MySpace has announced that it will use OpenID for its privacy and identity framework. This is certainly good news and should be the direction that all service providers take in the area of ID management.

That said, the MySpace implementation of OpenID is lacking the ability to make your data portable to other networks, but that is something which will evolve. The more important development with regards to each adoption of OpenID is that your personal information and all your associated data will not be in the hands of one provider like Microsoft or Yahoo.

Full and open synchronization with other identify platforms and social networks would be much more complex than the current initiatives, and would likely confuse users at first, but ultimately this is what users are going to want: Truly portable social network data. It's the only way users can end up owning their online identities.

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Before you decide to take the plunge into OpenSim, be aware of a couple of facts. One, it's based on Microsoft technology. That's okay except for fact number two, which is that Microsoft wants to control the information about your avatar from grid-to-grid by using its repackaged Passport technology.

The OpenSim infrastructure is built with Microsoft's .NET framework. Ultimately this means that OpenSim will be tied to Redmond instead of truly being an open framework. That's not to say that OpenSim code isn't open source, but rather, that the framework on which it is built (.NET) is not truly open. But the more disturbing development is that Microsoft wants users to use their old Passport technology (renamed Windows Live ID) as the means to control avatar information.

While you may shrug this off, keep in mind that having one provider monitor your every move, monitor what you buy, who you talk to, even what you say, is not the ideal situation, and certainly runs counter to the idea of Open Source. While we do have a similar situation at present with Second Life and Linden Lab, the stakes are greater in the Microsoft scenario because the Windows Live ID is designed to follow you on the entire web, something which large providers such as eBay rejected some time ago:

Microsoft's technology for identity-management on the Internet in the form of Passport took another major beating today when eBay announced that they are discontinuing their support for it. Users of eBay would not be able to use their Passport Ids to login to eBay starting late January. This news comes just after a few months another major online portal in Monster.com dropped support for Passport from their online job website.

The answer to the identity problem really should be in an open, neutral standards framework, as opposed to being owned by a single corporation. To that end we support the use of OpenID and recommend it for rollout of any new grid deployment and/or new web services. In our estimation, placing ID management in the hands of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, or any other private corporation is a risk to you and your business.

as OpenSim continues to gain traction, tying Microsoft technology into OpenSim’s code increases the pool of developers allied with Redmond. And if OpenSim takes off, a Windows Live ID-based avatar identity gives Microsoft a leg up against the identity management tools offered by Google, Yahoo, and OpenID.

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