Over on my Disruptive Telephony blog, I have been devoting some time to exploring the world of OpenID, but I thought I also should mention it here because we in the social media space are probably the ones who can benefit the most, at least initially. OpenID aims to solve one very basic issue:
- How many times do you have to enter the same personal information into web sites?
- How many different login accounts do you have to create?
- What if you could have one identity that you used to login everywhere?
- Or just a couple of identities that you could use in different personas? (i.e. a work ID and a personal ID?)
That's the idea behind OpenID. There's a whole lot of buzz going on these days given that Microsoft announced they would support OpenID and AOL is now supporting it as well. Here's some great introductory info:
- Screencast on how to use OpenID
- Video from ETech 2006 - "Who is the Dick on your site?" by Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity (nice history of identity efforts)
You also can see my post about my research thus far... and my del.icio.us trail on the topic. If you're not tuned it to what is happening with OpenID, I'd definitely encourage you to check it out.
P.S. I'm pretty sure OpenID will NOT address Steve Rubel's concerns... but it's something interesting to think about.
