Have you ever used one of those social toolbars, like the Meebo Bar? Well, Meebo is now proposing a new open standard called xAuth. What’s this? It lets developers use it to get information on what social networks you are on.

xAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.

Meaning that toolbar vendors, like Meebo, can now take advantage of this new open platform in order to provide a better user experience to the users. Specifically, users will be able to see social elements only from the social networks that they are actually on. This could lead to fewer HTTP requests that are usually necessary to recognize every potential online service. In addition, xAuth gives the users the option to decide which services pass data to sites through xAuth using the HTML5 methods window.postMessage and localStorage. In other words, the user has complete control of this exchange of data that takes place between the service and the site. This one strongly reminds me of a talk by Aza Raskin titled “You-Centric: The Future of Browsing” which I strongly suggest you see it. The whole idea of complete control of your data hovers around most of Mozilla’s projects like the latest Contacts.

As for the social toolbars, I personally am not very fond of, probably because I do not like the current implementation of these toolbars. Though I have used them one or two times -and they seemed quite handy- I never liked them. I don’t like the way they show up and I don’t like the way the look like.

However, xAuth seems that it grabbed my attention. I am wondering, now that developers can actually grab that information about your social networks how this could help make experiencing the web even better. I mean, why do I have to be bombarded with all these sharing/like buttons if I haven’t even joined each particular social network? And the same goes for all these commenting systems like Disqus.

Moreover, this would be very-very-very interesting for all the mobile platforms out there. Providing a faster and a better mobile experience happens to be one big fcuking reason to support xAuth.

More information on xAuth here and here.

Update: Don’t forget to watch Meebo’s CEO talk with Robert Scoble about xAuth here.