OpenID + OAuth: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

Today, Google and Plaxo released a hybrid protocol that combines OpenID , the open online identity standard, with OAuth , the secure data portability standard. Too often, when a Website wants to import your contacts from another Web service, it asks for your login and pasowrd credentials. OAuth gets around that by sending you back to the original site where you login and authorize the one-time transfer of data. It is much more secure. And now it works with OpenID. So far, this is just a test between Plaxo and Google, where a Plaxo member can invite someone via Gmail. Plaxo marketing VP John McCrea argues that this approach is: