OpenID Archive

At the Internet Identity Workshop today, OpenID 2.0 officially launched. At the NY Tech Meetup last night, someone commented to me that OpenID just isn’t worth it in its current form and that he created an OpenID but can’t remember what it is or how to use it. I wrote up my thoughts and recap of my conversation with JanRain Founder Larry Drebes. Richard has some additional commentary on the final release today. It’s still missing the marketing. I will keep saying this until it’s fixed.

Janrain noted today – OpenID 2.0 offers an improved user experience for consumers and reduces Web application development time by up to 30-40%.

New features for users include:

• Security Improvements – Heightened authentication procedures dramatically reduce the risk of identity theft and phishing attacks.
• Attribute Exchange – Enables OpenIDs to transport detailed profile information including frequent flyer numbers, calendar information and favorite books and movies.
• Directed Identity – Individuals who wish to maintain more than one profile now have access to single sign-on without the using the same OpenID on each site.

New features for developers include:

• Ubiquitous Library Support – Application developers benefit from high-quality library support available from JanRain and other vendors for all popular languages and platforms.
• Extensible Discovery – XML based OpenID discovery. Rich service content available at OpenID service endpoint.
• Extensions – Formalized extensions enable new technologies such as Attribute Exchange.
• Identifier Recycling – Formal policies and procedures now exist to handle expired OpenIDs.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Larry Drebes, VP of Engineering and Founder of JanRain. JanRain has a product named Pibb which we reviewed earlier this year and they also are heavy participants into OpenID. It’s OpenID 2.0 that we spoke about for well over an hour. I look at OpenID as an interesting challenge, one which I would love to be the head of marketing for. It’s a developer product, not a nice, fluffy marketing product which makes it interesting to try to get the mainstream to adopt. There is a huge need for a way to use the same identity credentials at multiple locations. Just yesterday, I had to create logins at 9 new services and each one basically asked me the same things – what a pain.

We spoke about the technology side of OpenID 2.0 for half the call, and the marketing/outreach side for the other half. Here are my notes from the call. And please read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article on making OpenID easy.

OpenID 2.0 is more secure with better cryptography than the previous releases. Larry kept hitting on the point that the 2.0 release will have actual documentation which is a good thing. I hear there are several hundred pages of documentation. Available on the Kindle?

OpenID 2.0 comes with identifyer recycling – Larry noted that the largest Internet players (msn, aol, etc.) can often run out of logins, and OpenID 2.0 fixes this as it allows the providers to reuse the logins as needed.

Directed Identity is another new feature. Basically what this allows a site to do is to associate a person’s OpenID login with other accounts to build a reputation level. This is pretty cool – could be the reputation system we’ve been speaking about for ten years now.

There are 160 million "enabled" users – this includes any AOL user. Of course this is not the same as "active" users – the 160 million refers to accounts that could be used with OpenID.

Apple’s Leopard operating system comes with built-in OpenID libraries. This is the first time that an OS comes with OpenID built into the core.

We briefly spoke about Pibb and Larry noted, "We believe communication is the killer app of the Internet and the current crop of communication tools has stalled on features and functions." Pibb has 8000 users and they are working towards a 2.0 release early next year. Naturally it will be rich in OpenID functionality.

One of the things I asked about is why there is no browser plugin with OpenID built-in. This way, when I hit a site that uses it, it automatically logs me in and gets everything setup in the background without any work on my part. Larry said there is a plugin in the works for Firefox called "Seatbelt" and it’s created by Verisign.

There is talk that Google and Microsoft will begin supporting OpenID as well. Google announced yesterday that Blogger now supports OpenID for commenting.

Fine, the technical side of OpenID 2.0 is set and ready-to-go. It’s hot. Now, what I’d like to see is marketing staff added to the project. Let’s make this a bit sexier, and way more consumer-friendly. I’d love to see OpenID camps only for marketing. OpenID has to become as common a term as Google is for searches or iPod is for music devices. When we reach this point, the 160 million enabled users will actually become active users. And then instead of focusing our time building "YALS" (yet another login system), we can focus on building great applications and let the login be handled by OpenID.

Lately OpenID has been hitting the front page of digg, del.icio.us, and many other large websites. People have been talking about OpenID quite a bit in the last few weeks and there are many people out there who don't even know what OpenID is or what it's about. So I'm here to tell you what it is and why it's so big.

While startups have been popping up left and right for over a year, most of the startups create their own user system. Which means that on almost every cool new startup's site, you have to create and manage a new account. OpenID is a decentralized identity system which allows you to create one single account and use it all across the web.

So what do I mean when I say 'decentralized identity'? Basically, you can host your identity on any server that you choose, whether you put up your own or use alternatives like myopenid.com. This means that if you want to keep your information away from individual websites you can use your OpenID account and login safely without giving your information away.

This is one of two reasons why OpenID is booming right now. Not only does it keep a lot of your information safe it also makes being a big time web service user much easier to manage. As I mentioned before you only have to manage your one account and you're all set.

Having a service such as this, where you can create your single account and use it everywhere has been a hard thing to accomplish, or at least make successful. The hard part about it has been the adoption process. Getting large well known sites, to implement the OpenID system hasn't been the easiest task, but now there are companies jumping on the bandwagon. The main reason for this is that it costs virtually nothing to implement and many people would like to use their OpenID accounts.

Though it may be too early to call I think that OpenID is going to be a huge success. It is really in the adoption phase at the moment, and I think that if people keep getting excited about having a decentralized account for all of their web accounts, more companies will continue to integrate it into their web services.

Alright so I have some updates for you CenterNetworks peeps!

• OpenID support… I have changed the top section which used to house the email RSS signup. Now it houses a login box for OpenID. So pop your id in, and you will be registered. I will call this a beta release, so if you run into any issues, please let me know. So basically you have 3 options on CN. You can remain anonymous and comment, you can register and create a profile (which will work on any Drupal site) or you can use OpenID to create your login. Either way, the best current benefit of registration is that you will see the new content immediately. Anonymous users are on a 30 minute cache. There will be more benefits coming this Spring for registering.
• Archive… several people have asked for a full big-daddy archive page. It has arrived via FedEx and is installed. The link is up in the header or click here to view.
• Forums – I need feedback on the forums. Right now, there are very few posts. If you all don't see a benefit in it, I can remove it. I have added a left menu option so now when you post on the forum, it will post a link on every page on the site. Who else offers that! And coming soon will be the ability to actually post your content on the home page. So let me know what you think of the forums.
• Free ads update – we have over 80 submissions for the free ads. Keep those submissions coming! Currently Tickspot holds the ad slot.
• Some stats notes: we had 70,000 unique visitors last weekend, and 40,000 the Saturday earlier. Traffic is starting to really pick up which is awesome, thank you thank you thank you! Technorati might actually break 5,000 soon, and that's from 10,000 last month. I appreciate all of the links. Perhaps you might be interested in an advertisement on CN?

Thanks for visiting, returning, commenting, rss'ing, advertising, feedbacking, skyping, IMing, chatting, and all the other ing's. I appreciate you stopping by and welcome any feedback you have. Positive or negative, I want to make sure I do my best to service your needs (your web needs that is!)