Social networking company Plaxo has enhanced its support for emerging open standard technologies for online identities and personal information management.
Plaxo — which bills itself as the creator of the “smart address book” service — recently updated its 3.0 beta software to support the open standards OpenID and microformats.
OpenID is a decentralized single sign-on system. For sites honoring OpenID, users do not need to generate and remember another username and password. Instead, they can sign-in with personal URL that they have registered with any OpenID Provider.
The company also published an OpenID implementation guide to accelerate its adoption across the industry.
Microformats are standards-based data formats that identify specific information on a webpage such as a calendar event or contact information and allow it to be easily shared with other services. Plaxo has implemented support for the microformats hCard and hCal.
Plaxo offers a free and a premium paid service. More information on the differences in the services can be found on the company’s Web site.