With social networking services booming, website operators are increasingly looking for ways to make their sites play well in the social world.
Witness the clutter of “share this” buttons on websites urging surfers to share a video or an article with a litany of social networking services that the user may or may not belong to.
Now Internet chat and toolbar company Meebo is introducing another option that it says will allow websites to custom tailor the experience to each visitor’s personal social networking predilections.
With XAuth (Extended Authentication), Meebo says it has developed a standard framework for the Web that allows sites to automatically detect which social networking or communication service a surfer is logged onto — when the person visits another website they can quickly begin interacting with their friends on the site and quickly share the site’s content across their network.
Meebo says the idea of XAuth is to provide an open technology standard that all social networks and online publishers can join to improve the social features on their sites. So far Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and MySpace are among the Internet players that have joined the effort.
