Blog search engine Technorati announced tonight that bloggers will now be able to claim ownership of their blogs with Open ID credentials and that more work in support of Open ID is on the way.
Open ID provides one URL you can use to identify yourself at all participating sites around the web. You can handle the logistics yourself or you can pay any number of different vendors to register your ID and resolve requests for information about you.
The movement to spread Open ID aims to make our lives easier, our data more secure and help users avoid closed silos from big vendors throwing their weight around unfairly. Ongoing and meaningful support for the standard by Technorati is a big deal. Add this to the body of forward looking work, like microformats, that’s going on at Technorati.
Many other vendors, including large ones like Microsoft, Oracle and SUN, are participating in Open ID discussions but for one of the major players in the new web community to make a tangible move like this will provide support for what’s all too often a fringe looking grass roots effort. When the more community oriented players in the Web 2.0 scene move first, then they can exercise greater influence over the landscape of the future.
As the Technorati blog post points out, other vendors supporting Open ID include trailblazers LiveJournal and Six Apart’s Vox.
For more information and background on Open ID, see the Berkman Center’s IdentityGang.org, this interview I did with Open ID evangelist Kaliya Hamlin in July and the Wikipedia entry on Open ID.
How does this compare to yahoo’s bb auth or other similar systems?
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meaning?
This is a really interesting space, as we have all seen Passport fail and now other companies are trying to position themselves as the new identity race starts again.
Yahoo! with BBAuth because it makes sence to unify there existing products and they have such a huge user base, or Sxip because authentication should be transparent.
Who will win? Time will tell but like I said, it will be interesting.
Rob Ellis
I really don’t get it? I think having multiple such mechanisms defeats the whole purpose. So, does this mean one day a user is going to presented with 100+ options to choose from in order to login? Select (i) to login using Yahoo account (ii) with typekey (iii) google aa (iv) facebook (v) flickr (vi) sxip ….
Marshall: Nice coverage. I’m surprised there was no coverage of the much-much slicker and simply better search results over at Technorati. For example, check the new UI: http://technora...l%20kirkpatrick . It seems to have a healthy Alexa effect.
Startups.in/India: uh, Yahoo’s auth and OpenID are pretty different (check that OpenID page on Wikipedia). To begin with, the former is a new and propriatory mechanism, while OpenID is open, “standard”, and has been around for a while.
I have a feeling a certain Chris Messina will love this..
Anyone can setup his OpenID on his own domain, using simple delegation. 10 bounties were offered a few months ago to bring OpenID to more applications. Eventually, we’ll be able to signup to a whole lot of websites using a single identity, and register this identity with many decentralized providers.
There are still an issue with silo’s, Open ID is a system that is based on having your identity stored on a server, and ponting sites that want your ID to a URL. Most users won’t host their own servers, nor will they forward their own domain/URL to a openID hosting server. This means that picking an openID host is critcal, most (at this point) don’t have a mechanism to transfer your ident to another server. There are also issue of trust when anyone can host a server;
I went to a demo of this be the folks in Portland, OR, but admitted that there are still some issues with mobility of the information, and the interface to accept trust between a open-ID server, and a third party app.
Great Idea,
But i’m surprised Technorati is adopting it at this stage.
This never really caught on at Livejournal…I remember when they started supporting it, people just sort of seemed suspicious. The average teenaged user doesn’t see any benefit or added value, from what I’ve gleaned from comments.
Justin: great comment … you’re right, there are still issues with it. However, so many folks have tried, and failed to deliver this sort of solution. OpenID not only is the best option today, it has the best chance of solving the problem from the perspective of the users. To me this is identity the open source way; grass-roots, bottoms up, light-weight, etc. I applaud Technorati for helping lead the way on this.
There have been lots of discussion on BBAuth, the code bounty and other topics around OpenID. Just use Technorati to find the discussions.
From http://janrain.com/:
JanRain is delivering Internet-scale user-centric identity solutions leveraging the OpenID protocol.
No wonder these companies don’t catch on. They use BS English. Leverage is a mechanical advantage gained by using a lever, or use of a small investment to gain a high return.
When companies use ‘leverage’ as a buzz word (as above), it just looks ignorant and sort of 2003. Here, ‘employing’ would work just fine. When I read a first sentence like that on a website, ‘poor communication skills’ is the impression I get.
You’re welcome.
hi
Startups.in/India – Given how OpenID works, choosing an identity provider shouldn’t really be a concern. Yes, you can have multiple identities. However, OpenID binds your identity to a page that bears the identity provider specifics; when you authenticate with it, you’re using *your* page.
Justin – Technorati’s goal is to experiment with simply lowering the barrier for user identification. We feel that OpenID’s system of using a URL to identify a person is very powerful. Is it too early to embrace distributed identity? Perhaps, but we’re betting that the risks of moving with the evolution of OpenID are lower than the risks of not trying at all.
Thanks Ian. But what did you mean by “…using ‘my’ page.” Probably, I should just RTFM.
Is there a standard OpenID website where everybody goes to get their own OpenID or doesn’t it work like that?
Boris, you might want to check out
http://getopenid.com/
http://openidta.../action/signup/
This is good news but when are the other big players going to adopt it.
There are multiple sites where you can store your identity (see wikipedia article, section “OpenID URL registrars”). This is another advantage of this protocol, i.e. there is noone that ‘owns’ it, unlike what happens in Passport. I am personally much more confident in this protocol exactly for this reason.
As more and more web based services come online, a simpler way of signing up/logging in with a single profile is absolutely a must. Today you login to your Windows/Linux desktop only once, and then use all sorts of applications from multiple vendors. If “web 2.0″ wants to replace or mimick the desktop, it must provide the same simplicity…
OpenID? That’s good. In that case, users do not have to have multiple IDs.
The implementation or use of OpenID just confuses me. I have still not worked out how it actually works.
I’m a big supporter of the Open ID movement. The details of the protocol aren’t easily understandable on the first read, but this is largely an issue of improving the documentation. For me, improved documentation and tutorials are the single most important piece of accelerating Open ID adoption.
There’s clearly a lot of confusion about Open ID at the moment. The key is this: one ID you can use at all supporting sites where you control who keeps track of your ID. The rest is just protocol details — those are the confusing part.
Oh, and take it easy on the “leverage” comment. What’s the point? If you don’t have anything insightful to say about the ideas, please don’t resort to pompous and *trendy* discussion of what the acceptable buzz-verbs of the day are. You lose credibility by even bringing it up.
hmm … kinda cool i guess that way i can have one id for everything…but this might cause other problems for search engines…
Microsoft is suppose to be launching new CardPass service with Vista that will attempt the universal login problem again. I think that an open source platform will fair better then a company who is trying to capitalize on universal login. Either way this concept requires universal adoption by the largest internet players (Google, Yahoo, etc.) in order to work.
Ahh, this problem domain again. I definintely support OpenID, but I would picture, as Adam Fisk pointed out, that OpenID not grow beyond a low level protocol. I envision Google, Yahoo, et al. providing value add services on top of the OpenID standard, that would enable engineers at startups to avoid repetitive tasks such as user registration, authentication and profile management. This is more than just Yahoo’s SSO, we’re talking about custom, extensible profiles and group management necessary to create your own applications. And in return, providing these services will reduce development times and costs associated with aquiring and integrating the startup into the existing corporate codebase.
This is a great idea…I hope this leads to bigger adoption of the opedID. Kudos to technorati for this step to support the user centered identity movement.
I’m a bit confused as to why this is needed???
David:
I think Dick Hardt sums it up really well in his video available here.
http://www.identity20.com/ or http://www.sxip.com
Mike Arrington:
Check out Sxip’s Score product to combat Wordpress spam.
Rob Ellis
It’s quite frustrating having so many identity solutions, but we decided to try Yahoo! BBauth because of the huge user base that Yahoo has.
Tera Patrick Anal
http://myblog.es/tera-patrick
trish stratus topless
http://myblog.es/trish-stratus
Technorati doesn’t really get it: I need to sign up with them to be able to use my existing openid?! WTF! The whole point of openid is to never, ever, ever need to sign up for anything again! As long as you can’t sign in with an openid account to technorati they are not supporting it really.
Clearly, I won’t sign up with them. The minute they properly support openid, I’ll happily use mine on their site as well.