Cloud identity tools for LinkedIn, Twitter and Microsoft Live

Ping Identity released Cloud Identity Connectors for LinkedIn, Twitter, and Microsoft Live, enabling the enterprise to rely on cloud service providers and social networking sites for third-party user authentication.

Ping Identity can now connect cloud businesses with six of the largest cloud service and social network sites, including Google (and other OpenID 2.0 providers), Salesforce and Facebook.

The LinkedIn, Twitter, and Microsoft Live Cloud Identity Connectors enable any of these social networking sites to be used for third party authentication.

Users visiting an e-business site can sign-on and register using an existing consumer identity. This improves registration rates by eliminating the need to develop a new profile and create another password, while providing a more personalized user experience.

Installed as an add on to PingFederate, the identity connectors use configuration information from PingFederate to create the HTML and javascript code necessary to develop compelling log-in pages featuring the logos of the top social networking websites.

The Cloud Identity Connectors interface with the LinkedIn, Twitter, and Microsoft Live APIs utilising OAuth for consent/authorisation and authentication. The access token obtained during this interaction can be used to authenticate subsequent API calls in order to gather additional data about the user or push information to the application.