Yesterday at the Digital ID conference in San Francisco, Orange, one of the major mobile operator and ISP with more than 40 million subscribers announced they would adopt the OpenID registration/identification standard. There was already a clear trend from big internet properties to adopt (Digg, Technorati Microsoft and AOL but also Yahoo and WikiPedia already announced that).
But this is the first time that a major TelCo is taking that step. There is already an implementation of OpenID on the French portal available at openid.orange.fr . Orange presents also on the page a list of OpenID providers.
This is a good news for OpenID standard. The question remaining concerns the pace of adoption by the users. I could not find the access to the openID page by navigating from the homepage of the portal. It will probably pushed at later stage after the first tests. I also found the explanation not simple enough to understand for a new user (most of them are not early adopters) and Orange should probably think about a a short visual/demo to explain simply the benefits of such a service. An international roll out will probably come out soon.
(via David Recordon)
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This is clearly a good first step — and it’s something I’ve talked a lot about myself — but over & above a simple method of signing onto web services, OpenID could easily be adapted to be the de facto portable personal profile manager, too…
40 million people with something they will either never use, or not know how to use.
I have no comment for this entry!
I ‘m a Vietnamese working in France, I would like to contact Michael or anyone in TC team for some propositions. Hope that Michael read comments every day
hoang281283@gmail.com
Agree with Duncan, just dont see a point
Ritu: open you eyes your might see it
Well, it’s up to Orange and how they market it if customers will use their OpenID. Marketing of OpenID could generally be better, no doubt about it.
BTW, the sites mentioned on the screenshot are not providers but consumers (or relying parties in OpenID terms), i.e. they accept an OpenID for login.
I think OpenID is a great idea, but have always felt it’s badly marketed too.
It’s fantastic to see big business finally taking on board some “standards” though.
Acceptance by telcos brings a whole new quality to OpenID, ’cause you can verify the real person behind the URL for the first time. http://blog.openiddirectory.co.....rt-openid/
LOL - the best part of this article was “An international roll out will probably come out soon”.
Not at the Orange I worked for! About the best the international team could come up with was branding requirements. Rolling out technology across the Group has so far been a complete disaster.
I’m with Carl - as an ex-Orange department head, I can confirm that France Telecom and Orange’s core competency is actualy the roll out of brands
Duncan:
We’re doing a soft launch. Hence the absence of pointers on the orange.fr home page. Give us some time.
Also, I can’t comment on international rollout.
On a side note, we haven’t found many France based/French language relying parties. So if you know any interesting ones, don’t hesitate to send the info our way.
Regards,
Ariel.
@Duncan:
Re #2 and those 40M…. you may be right, though it is still a good effort. There are plenty of OpenID screencasts that Ariel Gordon & Co. could point those 40M people to…
From my Simpy perspective, adding these 40M potential OpenID users is good. Simpy recently got OpenID support (see http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/.....sters.html ) and I’ve been monitoring its adoption and OpenID provider distribution. In a few weeks I’ll post the analysis on Simpy’s blog, but for now I’ll say that OpenID users are trickling in. I’ll watch out for openid.orange.fr
@Ariel Gordon:
Simpy.com “speaks” French, too. You may want to add it to the “En français” section at http://openid.orange.fr/help/#quelssont — I see you don’t have any social bookmarking services available in French and supporting OpenID there (I think Simpy is the only one :)).
SOunds like a gr8 idea to me.
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Here is a quick video explaining OpenID.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xcmY8Pk-qEk
I disagree with Duncan. As more and more companies adopt OpenID, the marketing message will become more refined. It all takes time and effort. And what we do have now is a huge effort.
-James
For those wondering why this matters:
Mobile Operators Stumble on Billable Identities, Apple Swoops In
—-
http://community.eqo.com/blog/....._swoops_in
The thesis in my post (pre-dating the Orange announcement) was that the mobile operators were missing a huge opportunity by not opening their identity infrastructure. Seems that at least one operator has realized this.
-Jeff
Isn’t this a quick response on the case in which Orange breached the Data Protection Act (DPA) security requirements in May 2007? After an investigation of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) they “found that Orange was not keeping its customers’ personal information secure and therefore was in breach with the DPA” [http://www.out-law.com/page-8165].
Running from one interested idea to another.
Richard Lalleman
MSc in Information and Knowledge Management student (Full time)
Good day! mobile fosamax attorney