Custom Branding for Live ID authentication and Data Portability

We announced a couple of cool things today on the back of Safer Internet Day which was yesterday and the Open ID UX summit which took place in Silicon Valley too. 

  1. Custom Branding for Live ID Authentication
  2. Legitimate developer libraries for moving address book data around

Custom Branding

The upside of this is that users get a familiar experience when logging into their Live ID account because developers are now able to skin the login screen with their own site brand.  Before, hopping from XYZ.com website to a Windows Live branded website to login was confusing to the user and often caused them to cancel what they were doing because they were uncertain why they had been redirected from the original site.

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Legitimate Data Portability

Rather than screen scraping or getting the user to type in their credentials into a third party site, both which are bad practices.  We’ve worked with Octazen to provide libraries for PHP (.NET/Java in the near future) so that using the legitimate Windows Live Contact API is easy to do and the user gets a trustworthy experience when sharing their information with other sites.

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For more information on these announcements head over to the Dev.live.com blog where you can see more screenshots and explanation to the technology and experiences that you can now get.

https://dev.live.com/blogs/devlive/archive/2009/02/11/470.aspx