MySpace announces OpenID support in July 2008

In the last week of July 2008 MySpace, at the time one of the most visited websites in the world, announced that it would support OpenID. The archived European OpenID blog reported it on 28 July 2008. This page is a historical retrospective. openideurope.eu is today an independent guide with no connection to MySpace, to the OpenID Foundation or to the former OpenID Europe Foundation.

What was announced

According to the old blog post, MySpace announced support for OpenID on the Tuesday of that week and tied it to its “Data Availability” initiative, a programme to let users take their profile information and friend lists to other web services. MySpace was to start as an OpenID provider: people with a MySpace profile would be able to use that profile to sign in at OpenID-enabled sites elsewhere. Reference works date the announcement to 22 July 2008.

The post also noted that MySpace planned to put extra value-added services on top of the OpenID and called this “an exciting time for OpenID”. The author was clearly pleased that a social network of that size had joined Yahoo and others in the provider camp. See Yahoo becomes an OpenID provider in 2008 for the preceding episode.

The size claim

The post claimed that MySpace brought “the grand total of OpenID enabled users on the Internet to well over 500 million”. It is worth reading this carefully. Earlier in 2008 the OpenID Foundation had counted about 350 million OpenID-enabled URLs, largely from large providers that had switched OpenID on for every account (Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo join the OpenID Foundation). Each new provider added its member base to the total whether or not any member ever used OpenID. A figure of 500 million therefore describes reach on paper. It is not a count of people logging in with OpenID.

Announcement versus launch

There is a catch that the original post does not mention. Wikipedia’s article on OpenID, which we used as a reference source, says that MySpace introduced its OpenID provider service in March 2009, so the 2008 news was a pledge, and users got a working service months later. We could not find a primary source on the exact launch date and therefore give it only as reported. The same article says that Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation in February 2009, while at the same time pushing its own login, as told in Facebook Connect vs OpenID.

Why a social network cared

In 2008 social networks wanted to be platforms. MySpace, Facebook, Google and others competed to become the place where users’ identity and friend lists lived, and “data portability” became a slogan. OpenID was the neutral piece of the picture: a login that worked across companies. Supporting it signalled openness. But a network earns money from keeping users inside, and sooner or later each platform preferred its own sign-in button, with richer data sharing and a larger audience. The result was the world of “Log in with Facebook” described in Why OpenID 2.0 faded.

What “Data Availability” meant

Behind the slogan was the idea that users should control their own data and be able to move it between services instead of leaving it locked inside one platform. The blog post does not explain the programme in detail, and we add no details that we cannot support. What matters for this story is only that OpenID was the building block for signing in, not for exchanging the data itself. That is exactly the gap that OAuth and later OpenID Connect tried to close.

What it means for readers today

For a European user of 2026, the MySpace story is a lesson about announcements. A press note can create the impression of a standard being everywhere, while real users still meet a password form. When you read claims about identity adoption, now including the EU Digital Identity Wallet, look for the date a service actually launched, who can use it and how many people do. Modern “Sign in with” buttons are explained in Sign in with Google and Apple, and the underlying older protocol in OpenID 2.0. The wider chronology is in the OpenID timeline.