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.
Well, I use TypeKey, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to implement OpenID on blogs (I also have an OpenID, too)
Lee,
Perhaps I should have headlined it as “OpenID.. coming to a blogging platform near you soon…” because support for OpenID is still nascent. LiveJournal supports it (but, gee, they originally created OpenID!) but TypePad doesn’t. WordPress doesn’t support it natively, but there’s a plugin:
http://verselogic.net/projects/wordpress/wordpress-openid-plugin/
I don’t know yet the status of the other blogging platforms. SixApart has some tools for MovableType available here at:
http://www.sixapart.com/pronet/docs/powertools
Interestingly, there’s also a WordPress plugin that puts the necessary code in your blog site HTML header so that you could use your blog as your OpenID (by delegating the actual ID to an ID provider):
http://www.lackoftalent.org/michael/blog/openid-for-wordpress/
This just allows you to use your blog URI as your OpenID, allowing you to remain independent of ID providers. For instance, while I don’t use WordPress, I’ve done the similar hack to my own site so that I can successfully login to any OpenID-enabled site with an OpenID of “danyork.com”. What it is actually doing is using my dyork.livejournal.com OpenID (since all LJ accounts are also OpenIDs).
BTW, it turns out that your TypeKey account can be used as an OpenID account as well:
http://markpasc.org/weblog/2005/09/21/use_typekey_as_your_openid_server
So the question starts to really be… what do you want to use as your OpenID? There are a ton of evolving choices…
Interesting stuff,
Dan
Dan, as always you are an amazing font of wisdom and knowledge!
Thanks for ALL of this and so much more that you share.
Your friend in the glorious Adelaide Hills,\
Lee
PING:
TITLE: Supporting OpenID, part 1: Enabling the WPMU site to be used as an OpenID provider
BLOG NAME: Behind The Blog
I am a big fan of OpenID for a range of reasons, some of which I articulated here, Why bloggers should learn about OpenID, and others I have outlined in my other blogging about identity issues and discussed in a Security Round Table podca…