PeoplePond Implements OpenID for Easier Service Access and Deeper Online Personal Identity Verification

Ferndale, Wash. (PRWEB) August 25, 2009

PeoplePond, a leading online service providing increased personal brand visibility, easy reputation management and advanced identity verification services within a single platform, announced today that profile owners can access their PeoplePond profiles by logging in with their OpenIDs and they can also use their OpenIDs to authenticate ownership over their accounts at any of the many sites which are supporting the OpenID user-authentication standard.

By implementing OpenID as a means of user-authentication with many social media and other online services, PeoplePond has dramatically increased the number of locations over which profile authors can demonstrate verified ownership thus creating more trust and legitimacy with their followers.

“PeoplePond’s implementation of OpenID improves the customer signup and login experience while greatly increasing the number of online services where verified account ownership is now possible,” said Theron McCollough, PeoplePond president. “This reflects our continued development as an open platform and for supporting our users’ need to authenticate ownership of their online content wherever it is located.”

Supported OpenID providers include Google, Yahoo!, WordPress, AOL, VeriSign, Six Apart, Basecamp and many more.

PeoplePond profiles enable personal brands to achieve greater visibility in online search results by training search engines to provide higher ranking to their online identity. Each PeoplePond profile is designed to provide the owner full control to implement a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that consolidates, verifies and boosts visibility for their entire online identity.

Additionally, the PeoplePond Identity Verification service confirms to profile visitors that the profile owner has proven they are who they say they are. This takes the teeth out of online identity thieves by providing a bona fide point of reference for online identity. Combining personal identity verification with service authentication provides visitors of PeoplePond profiles a means to know exactly who they are engaging online.

PeoplePond recently launched a sister site, CompanyPond, that boosts visibility of a company’s online identity by leveraging the numerous PeoplePond profiles a company has. This also trains search engines to promote online content produced by staff, evangelists, board members, etc. in their company’s search results.

About PeoplePond

PeoplePond (http://www.peoplepond.com) and CompanyPond (http://www.companypond.com) are part of the Cranberry Venture Partners, LLC network of Web sites. Cranberry is home to an unmatched team of innovative developers led by Internet visionary David McInnis. McInnis is best known for founding the first direct-to-consumer news service, PRWeb, which changed the way the world uses press releases. For more information about PeoplePond, LLC and the Cranberry Venture Partners, LLC network of Web sites visit http://www.cranberryventurepartners.com.

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PeoplePond Implements OpenID for Easier Service Access and Deeper Online Personal Identity Verification

Gigya Launches WordPress Plug-in Making It Easy to Add Social and Authentication Features Enabling Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Twitter, OpenID, Functionality

Palo Alto, CA (PRWEB) June 29, 2009

Gigya, Inc., the leading technology for connecting content and consumers with the social web, today announced that its Socialize technology is now available as a plug-in for WordPress. WordPress, the largest self-hosted blogging and OpenSource toolset in the world, has quickly become a favorite among developers seeking rich functionality and ease of use.

The new Socialize plug-in enables WordPress sites to easily add multi-dimensional social and authentication functionality by providing a single point of access to Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Sign in with Twitter as well as OpenID providers like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and AOL Mail. The plug-in is available on Gigya’s website at http://www.gigya.com/public/Content/About/Press.aspx?m=Press&p=1171 or on WordPress at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gigya-socialize-for-wordpress/

Powerful Authentication, Social and Promotional Features

WordPress sites that implement the plug-in have immediate access to a variety of powerful authentication and social features. Users can log into the site using their social network or webmail identity, enabling the Socialize plug-in to personalize the user experience by displaying the user’s name and image. Users can also update their status, promoting their activity to the newsfeeds of their social network, or invite specific social network friends with a custom message, driving traffic back to the original site. The Socialize WordPress plug-in also enables users to post comments on blog posts directly to their newsfeed on Facebook.

With the Socialize WordPress plug-in any site can allow users to share content or a specific event on the website. By integrating user profile and social graph data, Socialize makes the user experience social.

“It has never been easier to add so many social features to a WordPress powered site,” said Patrick Salyer, Director, Business Development, Gigya Inc. “No engineering skills are needed to add this functionality to your WordPress Toolbox. It is a great way to include seamless authentication, social and sharing features on any WordPress website.”

Gigya has also released a plug-in for Wildfire, the industry standard platform for sharing content to more than 70 destinations. The Wildfire WordPress plug-in enables bookmarking and email functionality for blog posts, providing another way for users to share content with friends and followers.

Currently, plug-ins for both WordPress and bbPress, WordPress’ forum software solution are available. They are both fully configurable from the WordPress administration panel, require little time to install, and require no programming knowledge.

Socialize’s code is also OpenSource, so developers can customize it as desired for their specific site needs.

About WordPress:

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architected personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL. It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there. For more information, please visit: http://www.wordpress.org.

About Gigya:

Gigya’s technology is the standard for connecting content and consumers with the social web, providing publishers and marketers with powerful tools for increasing audience reach and engagement. Reaching more than 250 million people each month, Gigya’s innovative widget advertising network enables marketers to engage consumers in social environments and enlist them as brand advocates. The company’s Wildfire and Socialize products enable publishers to syndicate and track their content across more than 70 unique platforms, and to integrate and promote their own websites with popular social platforms like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Publishers and advertisers including Coca-Cola, DoubleClick, Electronic Arts, Hyundai, JCPenney, Kraft, Levis, Photobucket, Samsung, Turner and Unilever choose Gigya to connect their content with the social web.

Media Contact:

Elizabeth Catterall

WIT Strategy

206.214.8036

ecatterall @ witstrategy.com

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Gigya Launches WordPress Plug-in Making It Easy to Add Social and Authentication Features Enabling Facebook Connect, MySpaceID, Twitter, OpenID, Functionality