MyBlogLog has been on a tear lately, releasing FOAF support, XFN support, and verification of sites.

Most interesting to me, however, has been their quiet rollout of MicroID support last week. ClaimID quickly posted, Fred Stutzman followed suit, and the MicroID blog alerted folks as well.

MicroID, for the uninitiated, is a snippet of code (which is made up a user’s email address and the URL of the current web page) which can be used by machines to verify the owner of the current web page. As a user, I find it incredibly annoying to tell the multitude of sites I use what other sites I use. (“You’re a computer,” I say. “Figure it out.”) As more sites roll out MicroIDs behind the scenes, pages/profiles I author (or am somehow responsible for, such as my YouTube Favorites links or my Amazon Wish List) could quickly be “sniffed out” by sites I already use.

Why would I want them to know what other pages/sites I use? I answered some of this in my interview upon joining YDN. But, quickly, it boils down to a decentralized and lightweight trust system that would allow the software behind any site at which I’m recognized to provide relevant content/recommendations. That, and I wouldn’t need to spend any time sharing all my other account usernames with a site I’m not even sure I want to continue using.

Anyway, MyBlogLog is following in the rich history of other major providers adding MicroID support: Digg, Plaxo, Last.fm, Wink, and others.

(Side note: As some may know, I had the good pleasure of working closely with the MyBlogLog team for the first two quarters of 2007. Aside from getting to getting to work on a new version of the Recent Readers widget and the all-new Profile widget (among migrating to the Yahoo! ID and the common Yahoo! profile representation), I got to work alongside some of the incredibly talented crew: Todd, John, Steve, Chris, Robyn, Ian and Eric.)