Posted by Mathew @ 11:21 am on February 7 2008 | |
If you’re one of those people who hates to have multiple logins for every site you come to (and I know I do), it’s great to see more big players like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo joining the OpenID project as board members. The more weight the idea gets behind it, the more likely that sites will use it, and Microsoft/Yahoo and Google pull a lot of weight.
As Mike Arrington at TechCrunch notes, however, this announcement only goes partway towards making it easy for you and I to employ one single sign-on for a multitude of sites. Why? Because all of the players involved are happy to join the team, but only Google has taken the extra step of becoming what’s called a “relying party” — meaning it accepts OpenID logins from other services and websites, which is kind of the whole point.
So yes, you can create an OpenID at MyOpenID or another trusted site (my OpenID page is here), but you won’t be able to use your Yahoo-generated or Microsoft-generated OpenID persona at one of the other big-name portals — at least not yet. So we’re falling well short of the interoperability thing. Hopefully some of those moves will start happening soon.
Absolutely agree with your "relying party" points. Otherwise its the sound of one hand clapping.
I think another major missing piece is an OpenID service from Amazon as part of their Web Services offering and preferably with "relying party" built in. Given that they have some 300,000 developers and growing, that would add huge momentum to the movement and possibly compell the others to step up support.
I'm a technology writer with The Globe and Mail in Toronto, and this is where I blog about things I come across on the Web. Feel free to leave a comment or use the contact form to send me an email.
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I think another major missing piece is an OpenID service from Amazon as part of their Web Services offering and preferably with "relying party" built in. Given that they have some 300,000 developers and growing, that would add huge momentum to the movement and possibly compell the others to step up support.
More on my blog:
http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2008/02/07/wher...
Best,
BW
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