PUBLIC MARKS with tags network & openid

Google Friend Connect is a service that helps site owners easily provide social features for their visitors. Users gain the ability to sign in to, make friends on, and interact with your site, making it more social and more dynamic. No programming expertise is required: just paste a snippet of code that we provide onto your site. Learn how to set up your site. As a user visiting friend connected sites, you can become members of sites and interact with other members who share your interests. You can also invite your friends from orkut, Google Talk, and other social networks to join the community. No need to create a new account for the site: simply use your Google, Yahoo!, AOL, or other OpenID account.

OpenID is another one of those "cool technologies you've never heard of" type of deals. OpenID is an open source initiative that provides a way for Web users to register their identity in one place and then use that identity anywhere on the Web that supports OpenID. This means that, as a user, you don't have to keep creating (and remembering) new user names and passwords at every site you visit. And, as a service provider, you can identify and authenticate users that show up at your site without having to do all of the user management involved in giving them access. The list of services that support OpenID is growing, but not as fast as it should be given how cool and useful OpenID is. Hopefully, this article will help with that. The idea behind OpenID is fairly simple: a Web user can get an ID from an OpenID provider and use that ID to access any Web application or service that supports OpenID.