When MySpace announced in July that it was adopting OpenID, supporters of the universal sign-on system hurrahed.
The number of "OpenID-enabled users" passed half a billion with the MySpace addition, says Bill Washburn, executive director of the OpenID Foundation. "It's clear the momentum is only just starting to pick up."
OpenID is the most visible and highly-evolved manifestation of the "user-centric ID movement" – a system of near universally accepted online personal identity management capabilities controlled by users (not Website operators), residing in a single secure place (either on the user's machine or in the Internet cloud), and employed with a single click across the Web. Once it's widely accepted, OpenID will let Internet users move from one Website to another, signing on with a single, transportable login.
Indeed, acceptance of OpenID, which was created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2005 and developed by a loose-knit group of developers at a clutch of small, mostly West Coast Web-identity startups, has accelerated in the last year. In February, a group of major tech companies, including
IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT), VeriSign Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN), and Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq: YHOO), joined the board of the OpenID Foundation, the independent, nonprofit group that's pushing the universal login.
There's one problem: MySpace, and most of the tech giants supporting OpenID, will only provide OpenID capabilities; none of them will accept it. In other words, you can use the protocol to create a single, transportable login to take your MySpace persona elsewhere on the Web, but you can't use another provider's OpenID account to log into your MySpace account. The same is true of AOL, and Google, and Yahoo, and so on. (When it started giving its members OpenID logins in February 2007, AOL said it was "actively working on" becoming a relying party, i.e., accepting OpenIDs from outside providers. That hasn't happened yet.)
"It's a one-way street," says Bob Blakley, a VP and identity management research director at the Burton Group research firm. "It means they're happy to create a risk for others by creating OpenIDs but not willing to accept risks other people create by issuing OpenIDs."
The few companies that are making broader use of OpenID are doing so very cautiously. Microsoft's Health Vault, for instance, accepts OpenIDs from two providers, based on their level of assurance and trustworthiness. Kim Cameron, Microsoft's chief architect of identity and access, says Health Vault will spread this privilege to other OpenID providers as it better understands how they authenticate and govern user IDs. Other companies are accepting OpenIDs from some providers and not others, without publicizing their criteria. Cameron calls these "very early examples of a governance-oriented approach."
I did a short report on Identity 2.0 almost exactly one year ago. I'm disappointed in how little progress it has made. When you see how fast other technologies are changing OpenID has not advanced as quickly. Why not?
Perhaps ask a CEO with a fair amount of OpenID, OpenProfile, or DNN background (e.g., re the latter perhaps ask Gif, iQportals.net, and say that Ron says hello, and would be interested to hear what he may foresee).
Do you foresee OpenId org embracing or perpetuating an OpenProfile initiative? With more and more web2.0 sites emerging, 'write once, run everywhere' sounds pretty nice and almost inevitable with less security risks than ID.
I realize why I didn't understand how OpenId worked at yahoo...it's because they don't accept it yet you can create one.
DotNetNuke sites provide OpenID integration AND it only takes mere 'minutes' to set up..not hours!
When is it hoped this will be achieved? “Health Vault will spread this privilege to other OpenID providers as it better understands how they authenticate and govern user IDs”
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