already lets members carry their profile data to external sites, so that they don't have to re-enter it, as well as discover which of their MySpace friends have accounts with those sites that participate in the MySpaceID system.

On Wednesday MySpace will announce that it has integrated support for the open standards OAuth and OpenID, for single sign-on and user authentication, with MySpaceID. This will let its members sign into MySpaceID-compatible Web sites with their MySpace credentials.

"We've had APIs for ways of associating and linking accounts, but we hadn't offered true single sign-on experience," said Max Engel, product lead for MySpaceID.

Now, at participating sites MySpace members will be able to log in by clicking a button and entering their credentials. "This code is very simple, very lightweight, easy to use and easy to implement," Engel said.

"We've taken OpenID and OAuth, put them together into a hybrid experience, and then wrapped it all in a pop-up [interface]. There's been a stigma around these technologies in the past, that OpenID can't have a good user experience, that there's no way to roll out these open technologies and do it in a way that users understand. Here, we're demonstrating that openness and elegant design aren't mutually exclusive," he added. "That's a huge part of this."