Gigaom Blog quote: “But do we really need the option of sharing on so many random services? What if those sharing widgets had a bit of intelligence about what a certain user already prefers, and just showed her the options she’s likely to use?”

Meebo has created a consortium, along with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, JanRain, Diquis, Gigya, and MySpace to encourage an open social standard called XAuth that enables a variety sites that opt in to connect with users. XAuth will be available under the Open Identity Exchange or the OpenID Foundation.

It appears that the tool will detect if a user has logged into any service or not in the recent past. As a result,  when the user does login, a display will show the user the social networks and communications sites that he or she logs in to most often to encourage the user to do so more.

Have you noticed the Meebo Bar at the bottom of hundreds of websites? You can even download the Meebo app for Droid.

Meebo is not the only service that provides such a toolbar or will be. Facebook plans to launch its own soon which could be as soon as during the f8 developer conference in San Francisco. And, about two years ago, James Mowery shared what he believed were among the top 23 best social networking toolbars and plugins for Firefox: del.icio.us, digg, Fleck, Facebook, kaboodle, Linkedin, LiVEJOURNAL, myspace.com, newsvine, NowPublic, orkut, RatePoint, Simpy, SQUIDOO, StumbleUpon, twitter, Technorati, Skype, YouTube, Wikipedia and Mashable Jobs.

But do users want to have any one source to have so much power over what, when, where, why, and how they use the Internet? Even if there are privacy restriction and white-listing intact, what does that mena? Take a look at the recent announcement that the U.S.A. Library of Congress will archive all Tweets since the first day of 2006.

Take note that Meebo is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm. Check the rest of True Ventures’ portfolio at http://www.trueventures.com/portfolio/.

Read more at http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/04/meebo-uses-xauth-to-try-and-block-facebook/#ixzz0ljvTAWeu.