I hate creating a new profile every time I go to a new place on the web. Even worse is that when some of my information changes, like, say, my job for example, I am in update unhappy place.
Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a way to create an RSS feed of my profile and "about" information? Then I could give the feed of that info to each site I maintain a profile with — and every time I changed the info in one place, it would get changed in all of them.
Has anyone done this, and I just missed the memo? I know OpenID is a protocol for login stuff — but I don’t see it working in the way I’ve described. #
Bud the Teacher
Inquiry & Reflection for Better Learning
OpenID supports all kinds of “about me” fields. What’s your first name? last name? preferred username? phone number? etc… it’s not used much, but it’s there…
FOAF.
Thanks, y’all, for the quick responses.
D’Arcy — I’m an OpenID technidiot, so there’s lots I don’t know about the tool — but it can’t update my profile at Flickr, or Blogger, or all those other web spaces, can it?
Tom — Same question about FOAF. Can I use it as a de-facto profile? As a way to update those spaces I mentioned, or the ton of others that I won’t remember to update until I go back to those pages?
If About pages can support HTML, can you just stick an RSS link in there, in lieu of the whole schpiel?
The OpenID 2.0 spec (in a pretty clean beta) supports attribute exchange. In the current spec, there is a pretty widely supported extension called sreg that supports basic info requested on many sites.
This post is from last fall, but it alludes to the potential of attribute exchange for the exact issue you describe in this post.
Cheers,
Bill