Kyle Hayes

Tech, Musings, Life

OpenID - Big Adopters, Big Future?

| Comments

I originally heard about OpenID around 6-8 months ago or so and immediately went to myopenid.com to secure my domain. After signing up and being anxious to try out the new “single-sign on process” I perused the list of sites that use the OpenID standard. The process was interesting. It’s not as cut and dry as one would hope, but it isn’t bad. The issue is that some sites still require additional profile information that may not be included in your OpenID account. Additionally, it is strange to me that your “username” is a URL as opposed to an email address, which are also globally unique.

The experience was less than exciting and I didn’t see a huge benefit of it at the time in the manner that it was implemented.

Since then, I have come a cross a few sites that I actually use that have added OpenID integration. Only one of those have I actually linked my OpenID account: Plaxo. As for the others, I just didn’t care enough to do so.

As of recent, I have noticed a few large big adopters to the OpenID standard, namely, Yahoo!. With a large brand name like Yahoo! supporting the OpenID standard, I can see the benefit of other sites using it as a means of providing users account access to their sites. Yahoo! enabled all 248 million registered users with OpenID accounts; that is a huge user base! Curious, I used Plaxo as a test case for logging in with my Yahoo! OpenID. The process is great, simply click the “Sign-in with Yahoo! ID” button and it redirects you to a Yahoo! OpenID page informing you the website that is attempting to access your account and some other details. From there, you simply click “Let me In” which will prompt Yahoo! to send Plaxo your unique OpenID URL. This is the step that is better than using a service like myopenid.com. With Yahoo! being an OpenID provider, you simply use your Yahoo! Id when accessing OpenID services and Yahoo! will deal with the actual sending of the unique OpenID URL to the requesting service. Now that my Yahoo! OpenID account is associated, anytime I go back to Plaxo, I click sign in with Yahoo! ID, it does a quick redirect, as mentioned above, to Yahoo! and then I click “Let Me In” and I am immediately logged in (provided that I am already logged in with Yahoo!, you get directed to a Yahoo! login page if you are not already logged in). The benefit here, is that the only username and password you need to remember, is your Yahoo! one. That’s it.

Another thing that should encourage developers to look into this and give OpenID a try, is the amount of resources to help in implementation and use:

Overall, now that I have seen where the OpenID standard is today and with some large adopters like Yahoo! and Plaxo on-board, I think I will take another look at this attempt to unify the web and provide people with the ultimate single sign-on method. Standards like this are very difficult to get into the mainstream. I was weary of OpenID taking off with it’s initial push, but today when I saw how Yahoo! did it, I felt much better about OpenIDs continuing success. Even so, if an average user is prompted on a registration screen to either register with the site or use their “OpenID account”, they will probably use the site’s registration for lack of knowledge of the benefits of OpenID. One way that developer’s can push this revolution in a more specific direction is to only allow access via an OpenID account. Assume users are stupid and only give them one option to sign-in to your site.

I would love to hear your comments, opinions, and constructive criticism on this topic. I think it is very relevant today and is the right time to introduce such a standard. Also, if you have other resources to share, please do so in the comments or send me a message.

Comments