For the sake of my developing RSI – one profile please!
By no means is this a new idea but it is certainly bothering more now than ever before. Why must I fill out all the same information on every social network site I visit? Why can’t I use something like OpenID to store all those boxes and the social network can get it from there? Secondly why can’t I get my profile information out? Facebook’s API is decent but generally useless as I can’t really grab the profile information I want. Sure I can pull events but I can’t put any back… It’s the same boring information.
This annoyance was brought on finally by Virb. I love the site, I appreciate the Flickr integration, but the bands I like are sorta in Facebook (I got bored, couldn’t list them all) and I am too lazy to fill in the boxes again.
This has come up with applications here. I want to share contact information between applications but I can’t. We have centralized authorization but it just tells me who they are (with the name they gave HR) and not much else. I want to try and fix that for the apps CPA manages and offer it to others at UW who want to use it.
I am still in the planning stage but I propose an update for Kiwi that is a sort of add-on to the core service of authentication. Here is what I want to add:
- Profile creation – email preferences, SMS, etc. The fields should be flexible and will certainly grow.
- Sharing between apps that use Kiwi for authentication.
- Once Kiwi logs you in you can go to any Kiwi authenticated application without logging in again.
- OpenID will be allowed to be used to authenticate, Kiwi will manage that.
Yes this all exists in other applications out there but not here. I want to play with OpenID anyway so here is my chance. What do you think? Is the effort worth it?
