FAQ
What is it?
Attribute exchange is a way of sharing your profile details with multiple sites without having to re-enter them.
Doesn't OpenID do that?
Yes, but this strikes me as overkill.
Where does the idea come from?
This came about after a number of conversations at the Oxford Barcamp related to OpenID, and some ponderings afterwards which led to the idea that OpenID was trying to solve too many problems in one go.
How does it work?
Exchangr is designed to be easy for both the user and a programmer to implement.
Simply request an item of data via a GET call to the api endpoint, passing an MD5 hash of the user's email address and the label you wish to return.
That sounds familiar...
The idea is very close to the idea behind Gravatar which is a good example of a web service which does one thing and does it very well.
Why use an email address?
Because, 1) pretty much anyone has them, 2) they are used throughout the internet as login credentials, 3) because of this they are nearly always a Globally Unique Identifier for a person.
Ok, so how do I as a user use it?
Sign up for an account and start filling in your profile!
What about security?
This proof of concept is only intended for public profile items such as your name or description. Later versions will use OAuth to provide security for private profile items too.
Who uses this?
Currently nobody - this is a proof of concept / experiment. If you're interested in implementing it then head over to the developer pages!