Let's face it: Remembering all of our login and passwords for the countless websites we use everyday sucks. I've blogged about it before. . OpenID set out to change all that, and appears to be making strides with both Microsoft and AOL. Will Google and Yahoo be next?
What is OpenID? "OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." That's fancy talk for "OpenID allows you to login 'everywhere' with one login/password".
AOL = 63 Million More Open IDs
AOL broke the news on February 14th, 2007 - They announced that every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI. This translates to over 63 Million additional OpenID accounts practically overnight. Frank Gruber from somewhatfrank.com calls this move by AOL "a huge show of support for the OpenID movement as the de facto standard in user credential interoperability." I tend to agree.
Microsoft and OpenID?
ReadWriteWeb.com reports that Jan Rain, VeriSign and Sxip have struck a deal with Redmond mammoth Microsoft to develop integration between Microsoft CardSpace and the open source project OpenID. CardSpace, is a framework developed by Microsoft which securely stores digital identities of a person, and provides a unified interface for choosing the identity for a particular transaction, such as logging in to a website. (Confused? Watch this video. )
ReadWriteWeb.com does a great job of summarizing the benefits for either party. We can hope though, that this assistance from Microsoft will allow OpenID to eliminate phishing and authentication concerns.
Where are Google and Yahoo?
It is strange to see Google be last out of the gate to support an open identity framework like OpenID. Perhaps this is because of their competing Google Account Authentication Proxy for Web-Based Applications service. In a nutshell: Google Account Authentication allows any third party web application to authenticate securely against a user's Google account.
Yahoo, similarly offers Browser-Based Authentication which operates in a very similar fashion to Google's offering. Both provide Single-Sign on capability like OpenID.
I would like to see Google and Yahoo get behind OpenID, either by offering each of their users an OpenID URI similar to what AOL has done, or by dedicating resources to enhancing and contributing to the OpenID framework. Could you imagine if overnight, OpenID got 51 million Gmail users and 250 million Yahoo users?
It would change the world.
UPDATE: Kevin Rose from Digg.com, announced at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, that Digg will adopt the OpenID decentralized digital identity platform later this year.
UPDATE: Apparently, Yahoo does support OpenID indirectly through idproxy.net and its Browser-Based Authentication service.
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