When I was looking over Brad Neuberg’s Paper Airplane thought experiment I noticed the single sign on feature, where you login to the browser, and then you are done.

I realized that this is what I actually want. Having one signon via OpenID is really nice. It allows me to plug in “http://almaer.com” as my identifier. However, I always have to go around finding the OpenID option (if it exists) and put that in.

What I really want is for the browser to do that work for me. If a site groks OpenID the browser should be able to pass that over without having me intervene at all. It could hide the entire login process if we came up with a microformat to let all sides know what is going on.

It would be a breath of fresh air to be able to jump through sites leaving comments on blogs, and checking out my todo list, all without me once having to actually login.

I wonder if a Gear could be made with a complementary microformat / server side handshake that could then give us single sign-on in all of the browsers.

As Brian McCallister suggests:

<link rel="openid-auth" href="..." />

Other Future APIs

• Services / Daemon API
• Notification API
• Crypto API
• Developer Tools
• Factory API updates
• Blob API
• Logging API
• Messaging API
• Location API
• Desktop Shortcut API
• Image Manipulation API
• Introduction to the series

Disclaimer: This is me rambling about APIs and tools that I would love to see in Gears, or the Open Web as a whole. Do you have ideas for cool Gears that make the Web better? Let us know!.