3rd party website authentication libraries (like openid)

Question

I'm building a website that will require user registration and logon.

I would like to use the facebook connect to let people create a basic account and to log on without having to create a local account themselves - and let them fill in more profile details when they want to.

What other 3rd party authorizations systems are there? Clearly openid is one option. And google seem to have a system too for loging onto other sites with your google logon. Are there any other systems? Does microsoft have one for msn logons? I found some hints but was unable to find any details.

Anyway, the programming question is are there any php libraries that will do this for me across a range of providers? I see ones for facebook and OpenID but I've not seen any library in php that abstracts away the differences? Before I program my own solution are there any libraries for this that I've not managed to find?

Answer 1

Keep in mind that Facebook is likely to become an openid provider in the near future (for some value of near).

If you really want EVERYTHING abstracted for you, JanRain takes care of exactly that task for you as a hosted service. The free version provides enough functionality to get started, and then if your app takes off, you can pay a bit for more functionality down the road.