Tour




Syndicated Profiles

FindMeOn.com lets you import your online profiles from many social networks / forums / etc into a standardized format we call 'Open SN' (Open Social Network') that you =update and manage on our site. OpenSN is an open interchange format released under the Open Standard CC-No-Derivs license on findmeon.org . OpenSN is essentially a collection/standardization of the most often occurring profile fields -- things we wish already functional standards covered, but don't.

You can use our profile builder to select which parts of this centrally managed identity you want to be viewable by each identity you list with our site. For example: Show your 'dating status' on a social network, but don't show your hometown on a photography site -- you get the idea. We then show that information on a special profile section for each identity you list, and make a machine readable format available via our API, so other websites can update your profile easily.

Our profile builder lets you trivially extend your profile on all your different websites -- if a website you join doesn't have a spot for you to list your favorite bands, don't worry -- just let that 'attribute' be viewable by that site. Visitors to FindMeOn.com can see it , and we make it available to your website whenever they want to support that field.

Our version of Syndicated Profile sharing is different than shared/distributed identity systems. We treat profile sharing as syndicated text, and don't require any sort of authentication or challenge. This is because of two important things

  • All syndicated profile information that we manage is the of that type that is already 'public' and people can find via google. We're not handling sensitive information like credit card numbers or phone numbers.
  • Information is tied to an id unique to each online identity. It's information that you want that online identity to know about, and people who visit you on that site through that online identity already see. The information isn't tied to 'you' as an individual directly, but an abstraction of you through the lens of that account.
This is usually called 'security through abstraction' or 'security through obfuscation'. This type of information sharing is not truly secure , but we feel that it is more than 'secure enough' for the kind of information we handle with it. We use more secure protocols, like OpenID which requires interactive approval , to handle sensitive data.

We'll soon be offering 'Bookmarklets' to work with many of the popular social networks. Dragging a bookmarklet onto your browser window and clicking on it will pull information from FindMeOn.com and place it into your other profile, and vice versa.



The Extended Tour