ReadWriteWeb

A new OpenID provider called LiquidID has just launched a service which offers email aliasing and redirection in addition to providing you with an OpenID. The aliasing service sits on top of OpenID and generates email aliases for you which can then be passed on to any OpenID-enabled web services. LiquidID will receive the emails sent from the services on your behalf and redirect them to you. However, if a particular email alias ever becomes compromised and starts receiving spam, LiquidID will block it.

According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted friend requests, messages, or posts on their social or professional network profile. While friend requests on their own seem innocuous enough, they are often just the first step towards whatever the spammers' intended malicious activity is, be it redirects to phishing or malware sites or even just unsolicited advertisements.

An interesting note came across our inboxes just now - the source of yesterday's FriendFeed spam has been revealed. If you've been using the social aggregator FriendFeed, then you may have noticed some odd-looking discussions yesterday where the same comment was repeated over and over by numerous different users. The source of this spam has now been identified, but this problem highlights a larger issue that could affect any company providing an open write API for developers to use - it only takes one developer's mistake to greatly impact a service.

For every 1000 people who read a tech blog post, there may be one that leaves a comment. Lurking in the crowd are any number of people who work for companies related to the subject of the post. They almost never comment, and when they do they often come across as obnoxious, self-promoting and spammy. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

OpenID is wildly convenient for users, which is good for vendors, but is that motivation enough to really spur its adoption? Cutting-edge social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia stopped issuing new user credentials last night and now requires new users to create a Ma.gnolia account using an OpenID from somewhere else.

Why? Because 75% of new accounts being created there lately have been created by spammers using automated tools. Spammers took over Ma.gnolia. Now, the company is using OpenID as a system of 3rd party verified identity and using the superior spam blocking skills of services like Yahoo! and AIM to clean up the Ma.gnolia ranks. Spamfighting could be the incentive that puts many other vendors over the edge to leverage OpenID.

? On the same night the sophisticated MySpace Application Platform was released to developers, Facebook announced an important forthcoming development that should make FB apps a whole lot less annoying. Let the Platform Wars begin!
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Starting next week, Facebook apps that get good user responses from Newsfeed messages (clickthroughs, app installs) will be allowed to send more notifications and apps that get fewer user responses to their notices will have the number of notices they can send cut down. Metered messaging based on user engagement could save the Facebook Platform from a growing sense of app fatigue.

Sometimes it's the little things that you have to love about the internet; especially when little things can help you clean up a big mess. I'm willing to bet that you've got hundreds of Facebook application invitations and requests that are sitting on your account cluttering things up. IgnoreAll.com is a simple Javascript bookmarklet that with one click selects the "ignore" option on every request except for friend requests, group invites and event notifications. It is simple and sweet.