Don't you hate it? You've decided to take a new snapshot of yourself and update your avatar on... oh... Last.fm, Digg.com, Facebook, Twitter, MeinVZ.net, Lokalisten.de, everywhere. You have to go to every single website and change it manually. Changed your relationship status, phone number or discovered you can't stand your favorite movie anymore? There you go again. I don't even know how many websites I've signed up for now offer a twitter-like status update that I can't be bothered to use.
I'm kinda fed up with it.
I wish I could publish a standardized XML file on my webspace which contains all the data (like my Avatar, Current Status etc.), so all those Web 2.0 services could parse it and update my profiles automatically. There could even be a ping-back like mechanism where I tell the services when to check my XML for updates to avoid unnecessary traffic.
Now it would be easy to spec out such an XML and offer APIs to parse it in various languages. But I guess it would be daft to do so, since existing services don't even start to pick up on OpenID. After all, collecting this precious data is all those Web 2.0 services do and you don't want anyone to interfere with your core business, right?
Yet at the same time I feel like all those services would be able to gather even more data about me if they were able to import and sync my data with their profile.
(I'm aware that one would probably be able to write a Facebook application which could import the XML and update your profile. As long as Facebook is the only service to support this import mechanism, it wouldn't really help anyone, though.)
Update: It seems OpenID itself already supports avatar syndication. Read more about it
here. (Thanks to
Julian Stahnke for the link)
