AOL and OpenID

John spilled the beans so I will too. AOL is doing OpenID! AOL is currently an identity provider (meaning you can log in on third-party openid-enabled sites using your spanking new OpenID URL, for example: http://openid.aol.com/kplawver), and we’re working on accepting OpenID logins on AOL products, but that’s going to take some time. See John’s post for all the details.\
This is really exciting for me. It’s another sign of us opening up, supporting emerging standards and trying new things. It means I won’t be all alone next month when we launch the super-secret Rails project, which will accept OpenID logins.\
Now, back to work so we can launch this thing on time and I can tell you all about it.

Comments

3 responses to “AOL and OpenID”

  1. Matthew Goldstein Avatar
    Matthew Goldstein

    Huzzah!
    Here’s a thought…some sites will take your OpenID login for livejournal and also grab your FOAF data to generate a friends list on that site.
    Is there a good way to take an AOL OpenID login and retrieve your buddy list? (I have a few thoughts, but they feel hackish)

  2. Kevin Avatar

    The buddy list is private, so being able to do it automatically wouldn’t happen. But, the buddy “gallery” from AIM Pages is public and you could fairly easily grab that. There’s an existing JSON API for it that we’d just need to document (it’d be easy enough to reverse engineer for anyone comfortable reading javascript).

  3. Steve Ganz Avatar

    Congrats, Kevin. That’s great news. Looking forward to Ape Shirt. Whatever it is. 😉