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February 7, 2008

OpenID Welcomes Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM

Michael Arrington

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As anticipated by TechCrunch UK in early January, OpenID is welcoming some big new partners to the club - Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM (TechCrunch UK anticipated all but Microsoft).

Google has been dabbling with OpenID for some time with its Blogger platform (and Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of OpenID, is now a Google employee).

Yahoo also announced support for OpenID earlier this month, which more than tripled the number of OpenID accounts to 350 million. 10,000 websites now accept OpenID accounts for login.

All of the newcomers, along with Yahoo, have joined OpenID’s corporate board and, we assume, will be making their user accounts OpenID-compatible. But it’s not clear that any of them are in a hurry to become a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites). OpenID looks like it’s going to be a winner, so big companies making their user accounts OpenID compatible is a good hedge. Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to “own” the user. Less attractive is allowing users from other sites to log into your services, so don’t expect that functionality to come for some time.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 6:19 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. OpenIDwatch

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:35 am

    Lots of noise without any impact, unfortunately.

  2. allen stern

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:35 am

    Good point about the “owning” of the user… I also think the marketing has got to be strengthened - would my mom even understand how to use openid? no way. YahooID is a good first step.

  3. allen stern

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:37 am

    I’d even go a step further - each company will want to be first - because users will only use one openid on a site - so if Google gets to the user first, Yahoo loses, etc.

  4. Scott Kveton

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:43 am

    That by-line should probably read Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! Yahoo! is also a part of this announcement and has joined as a member of the Board.

    - Scott Kveton
    OpenID Foundation

  5. Michael Arrington

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:47 am

    Scott - thanks for the copy editing. When are these guys going to become relying parties and actually make this meaningful?

  6. Andrew

    February 7th, 2008 at 6:56 am

    We just changed our app that was using facebook logins over to openID. Lots of people complained about requiring a facebook account, but so far openID is being more welcomed. The sign up is a breeze:

    http://www.votay.com/login/

  7. whatsNext

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:08 am

    I can’t get over how BAD this is for internet capitalism.
    **ARRRUUGHH**

  8. David Recordon

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:09 am

    Google is actually both a Provider and Relying Party on Blogger.

    While Yahoo! isn’t currently a Relying Party, I don’t think having all of their members be OpenID enabled is really anything to scoff at. It does mean that we’re getting to a world where a developer can assume (between AOL and Yahoo! currently) that everyone that shows up at their site has an OpenID. Certainly seeing Google extend this beyond Blogger and Microsoft adopt OpenID for Live would be taking this another step forward.

    I agree though that increasing the number of Relying Parties is quite important. This is a large part of why I’m excited to see these companies making the financial investment to join the board (@1 this isn’t just joining a mailing list) which by combining resources will help bring OpenID more mainstream.

  9. dedos

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:42 am

    Michael,

    I am waiting for your post on the 23andme Kit, I will like to purchase the kit but need a review form a reliable source.

    thx

  10. jack

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:44 am

    I guess it will be like what Bloglines plans: You can login with OpenID at their site but ONLY if you have your OpenID registered on their server. An OpenID registered at Google probably wouldn’t allow you to login at Flickr.

  11. JohnofScribbleSheet

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:51 am

    It won’t be long before everyone has to go Open ID.

  12. Steven Osborn

    February 7th, 2008 at 7:55 am

    Evil overlords unite to benefit man-kind! This is great news.

  13. Joseph Smarr

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:17 am

    I agree with David Recordon that Yahoo! providing OpenIDs for its 250M+ users is a huge deal in and of itself, because it now means that many more smaller sites will be incentivized to become RPs, which will feed the virtuous cycle.

    Plaxo has been an OpenID RP since last year, and we worked closely with Yahoo on their OpenID 2.0 implementation. There is a now a “Sign in with a Yahoo! ID” button on Plaxo’s signin/signup pages, which means Yahoo users can “log in with OpenID” without even knowing what OpenID is or that they have one. That to me is a real sign of progress. And something like 25% of our users have a Yahoo account, so supporting OpenID has a huge impact for us, and I suspect the same will be true for most sites.

    That said, from conversations I overhear, I think the big players are also interested in becoming RPs, but it’s clearly easier to start by being an OP and go from there. Either way, this is a big announcement and further cements OpenID as a grass-roots technology that has broken through to the mainstream.

  14. courtney benson

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:22 am

    All that cross-pollination provides more revenue and data collection for all - its called data-mining heaven

  15. gregory

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:22 am

    why is Open ID cool, and Real ID evil? they will combine soon enough, why not now?

    the geeks will be happy, and the government goons too, a rare win-win.

  16. David Recordon

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:30 am

    I’m a bit confused by the tie to RealID…is it just the name?

    OpenID, like email, can be run by anyone though, also like email, it probably will be provided to most people by large companies and service providers. Isn’t the anonymity problem equivalent to using the same email address (or IP address) on different services?

  17. 福泉市

    February 7th, 2008 at 8:59 am

    其实注册那么多ID真的没有用，大多数人还是只用一个ID，一个密码~~~除了银行密码~~

  18. Bill Washburn

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:17 am

    Mike -
    Asking “when will they become relying parties?” is a crucial question, no disagreement whatsoever. But it’s a bit like asking the old walled email gardens such as AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, and all, back in the pre-historic times, when they were going to give their users access to the Internet.

    Still, the step of joining the OpenID Foundation Board is a pretty strong move on the road toward embracing the whole OpenID philosophy of end-user free movement.

    I would argue that with this piece of the identity puzzle clearly in place, it will be seriously appealing for many tens of thousands of website operators to risk the investment of time and energy to implement OpenID specs because they can see how it will lower barriers to entry, increase ease of re-entry for repeat users, and ultimately help reduce their management costs.

  19. Deano

    February 7th, 2008 at 9:53 am

    I know you want everyone to know how cool you are, but really is it necessary to TWICE pat yourselves on the back in the first paragraph? I start to wonder what you think the news is - the news itself or that you “anticipated it”.

    The first paragraph is 189 characters. Pull out the self-admiration and it leaves:

    OpenID is welcoming some big new partners to the club - Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM.

    That’s 93 characters, and THAT is the news.

  20. tom

    February 7th, 2008 at 10:35 am

    i certainly do not mind openID as an alternative to a proprietary password login model. the problem is tha tit is being adopted in place of open completely anonymous environments. i find this a concern. just a i can walk into a cafe and start up a conversation without being ID’d at the door; i should be able to do the same on a blog or forum. sure i could establish a fake identity; by why should i. this all has more to do with data mining than ease of use. in my opinion it all stinks.

  21. Felipe

    February 7th, 2008 at 11:27 am

    “ID” is there, now we are waiting for the “Open” part …

  22. Vaclav Synacek

    February 7th, 2008 at 11:53 am

    If TC anticipated so well OpenID becoming mainstream, why isn’t TC OpenID enabled RP yet? When is this feature coming?

  23. missburrows

    February 7th, 2008 at 12:08 pm

    Once again, our choice to use OpenId exclusively for treasurelicous.com has proved to be a smart one.

    Welcome, Google, Microsoft, Verisign, et al., to the OpenId party. Go ahead and grab a drink, the pizza is in the other room. :)

  24. Ronald Lewis

    February 7th, 2008 at 3:32 pm

    We’ve long needed an open and global authentication system. I’m looking forward to the adoption that will follow.

    Congrats, OpenID.

  25. Sylvain Cottong

    February 7th, 2008 at 5:41 pm

    So we are going to have lot’s of OpenID’s, from different publishers, one from each major player such ass Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc an one or a few more for all the minor players - not that different from now, but already much less user accounts & logins to manage. It will be interesting to see how the data portability debate will interact with the OpenID concept.

  26. Ujwal

    February 8th, 2008 at 9:51 am

    Most people donot interact in a site because they have to “sign up” and this i hope alleviates that problem thus saving us small community sites like exoticbuddha.com , small sites and have users have less of a hassle.

    can’t wait to try this out ~

    and gratz OpenID !
    it definately is a coup !

    Ujw

  27. June Lovelace

    February 8th, 2008 at 5:08 pm

    Every time I see many big corps busy making press releases claiming
    they support a standard, that is almost a sure sign of failure…
    That means they haven’t figured out a strategy yet. Just see how
    awkward it is to use Yahoo OpenID today. They haven’t figured out
    anything yet but just to cuddle together to claim they are “OPEN”
    and up-to-date.

    I like the simple and working password mgr provided by mashedLife.com
    better. They just silently serve people’s real needs instead of
    claiming this and that.

    Consumers really do not care or understand OpenID and we don’t bother
    to. We have Mashedlife.

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