Most of us create identities across the web without much conscious thought. We fill in profiles, upload photos, videos, reviews, and bookmarks. Although this information is often public, it’s fragmented into the silos of individual websites. Wouldn’t it be a little magical if, when you signed up for a new site, the site said something like, “We notice you have a profile photo on Flickr and Twitter, would you like to use one of those or upload a new one?”
Glenn Jones has written a javascript library that collects data from different social profiles. It currently supports 70 sites and 142 endpoint mappings. Now that’s some real magic! You can download this engine for free at identengine.com.
He also did a presentation about blending social graph data and other open data sources at Twiist.be in Leuven.