Yeah, what I’m about to say may sound a bit weird (if not because I’m blogging it here instead of the SLOpenID blog :-s
Those of you who have been following my work on OpenID & SL will be aware that the SLOpenID project has been launched twice- first using the standalone PHP server, and then using Automattic’s WordPress:MU server plugin. Well, I’d like to announce that I’m planning on launching it again. The plans aren’t entirely concrete as I’ve had things interrupted over the last 6 months.
Early in the year, my computer was on the fritz so I was unable to do pretty much anything. Once I had a working system, I then had to concentrate on SL5B. Then there was the whole thing that occurred that led to me stepping down as head organiser of SL5B. Finally, I’ve had to do two significant rewrites of sw.slr- the first due to inefficient handling of Resident picks (they have no indexing data), they second due to the 2 million or so entities within sw.slr trying to contend for placement in a file system that is restricted to 100 thousand files. Fortunately, being forced to do the second rewrite made it more extensible (e.g. it’ll make it easier to port sw.slr to OpenSim).
Brief History of SLOpenID
- Discussion with Gwyn.
- Development using standalone PHP server.
- Redevelopment using WordPress:MU to allow for customised profiles.
The 3rd generation plan involves forgoing the “Highlander” mantra with SLOpenID- the basic gist being that there’s no need to create a new OpenID when you may have a perfectly good one already. Associating your existing OpenID with your SL ID will be the focus of the 3rd generation of SLOpenID, with the idea in mind to create one to one, one to many, many to one and many to many relationships between identities.
Identity Association
The way I hope to make it work is that you could associate all your alts with one OpenID, so that:
- You can switch between multiple accounts on Marvulous Networks websites in a similar manner to switching between multiple blogs on WordPress.com
- You only have to log in once on SLOpenID to log in on multiple 3rd party services with any of your SL identities.
- You can associate multiple OpenIDs with a single SL ID so you can still log into a Marvulous Networks website if one of the 3rd party OpenID servers goes down.