MySpace will announce support for the OpenID single sign-on framework sometime this week, we’ve heard from multiple sources. This will be the second largest implementation ever and will bring the total number of OpenID-enabled accounts to over half a billion. MySpace’s 200 million user IDs join Yahoo’s 250 million or so accounts, plus accounts from a number of other large providers.
Like most large company integrations, MySpace is at first becoming an OpenID issuer only, and may integrate as a relying party down the road. We’ve argued that becoming an issuer is essentially a land grab for user identities. The integration work on accepting OpenIDs from others is harder, and the payoff is less.
MySpace may also be writing code to extend the OpenID spec and allow easy integration of their Data Availability product to sites that accept MySpace OpenIDs.
Excellent news. Congratulations to Ben Metcalfe and the entire MySpace team.
worthless.
until they actually ACCEPT the OpenIDs, they are of no use.
Somebody (ahem, mike) needs to call these bozos out on only going halfway, or just not give them favorable press in the first place.
so far all the OpenID big-name issuers are like if all the banks said “we’ll let you WRITE checks…but you can’t CASH them here” - wow really? thanks guys! that’s so helpful!
Well put! It is useless! I work for a fairly big site (2M+ visitors monthly) and we support OpenID. We get less than 0.4% of signups (not 4%, 0.4%). So clearly, OpenID is important to a few digerati and no one else. Rest of the population couldn’t care less about OpenID! Only thing that *might* change that is if big players start using and promoting it heavily. But I don’t see that happening. Google’s far happier with everyone using their authentication than OpenID.
100%! Issue only is just promoting OpenID but no real benefit to the user. Is OpenID being exploited by the big companies? Is MySpace trying to control the facebook expansion? who knows!?
I created over 583 identities from various different websites I went to. Will this openid allow me to manage all my fake identities on these websites and not reveal me?
The reason why I’m asking is that I like to diversify my risk in case the government subpoena openid and bam, all my 583 fake identities will be revealed and I will be in big trouble for calling Bush an arrogant buffoon and that I saw Michael Arlington at a massage palor two days ago in San Francisco. With Michael, I can only imagine get sue for libel and slander. But with Bush, I might get arrested and jailed for life. Yeah, I remembered if someone is labelled enemy combatant, you are a lifer.
American freedom is worse than China because in China, they blocked bad content for you. In America, they record bad content you possess (drugs, child porn, bomb making material, story about killing America, Koran, etc.) and in the future use it to jail you.
People who complain about China’s freedom should look at American political system.
Using openid only opens yourself to more risk if you put everything in one basket. Diversification is the only way to reduce your risk of getting jail by the Bush administration.
I agree with gilltots. Unless this is an honest indication that MySpace and other large companies intend to become relying parties down the road, this seems worthless.
well i think that if you want to link everything then they are giving you that option if they are forcing us to go openid then we have a problem
When will these major web sites start accepting OpenId?
Yahoo, MySpace, Google are totally selfish in this arena.
Brennan and Gilltots certainly speak to what must come relaying and acceptance - and to be fair the article does point that out. But, why would MySpace start that way - to their current way of thinking, that would be like giving away accounts while they’re to stop the exodus of accounts out of myspace, or at least hold on to them anyway they can. Time will show that the data portability will pull the data out anyways.
But, for dataportability this is GREAT news - because it thrusts the notion of single sign on and data portability into the minds of millions of myspace consumers…and it’s not long after this that they’re going to start expecting data porability.
Plus, OpenID is currently so spartan in terms of what personal data fields it’s porting, that the original relayer will not have that much of a legacy.
OpenID must evolve such that it can adopt new user-fields from non-originator sites as decided by the user - obliterating the notion of relayer/issuer. In other words, you start at myspace with your username/password, maybe your gender too. But, then you use this ID on a new site that’s all about maps, where you further define your ‘profile’ to include your address - and you want to bring that ‘with you’ from now on in your OpenID. You, of course, should be able to do so and be able to manage this. Quickly, you see that the profile needs to be decoupled from the destination, having it’s own rights…which then goes to 583’s concerns about what you show where…which also should be addressed in the evolution of ID. And, it will be. This is where our company is starting to address consumer demands and will evolve to enable proactive identity management.
We’re launching our own relaying OpenID compliance August 1 - and we welcome this as good news…could be an just a little extra help with the registration process, making it faster for more signups.
Wow… open ID is really gaining some traction. This is great to see. I have having to remember so many usernames and passwords. And ps… what is the apture dashboard thing that popped up?
Mike
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Great momentum.. nice undertaking from MySpace.
Here is how it goes with OpenID
Until, someone like W3C or other organization will say that this will be a standard, no one will take it serious. I mean, I don’t think that it is enough that several big players are OK with this technology.
If the user is against it, the technology is useless.
So, I don’t see quite the hype here. It is just another option on MySpace login page.
And enough with this type of organization: Data Portability and so on. Those are only marketing movements. What did Microsoft or Google by joining … NOTHING.
If a technology or approach is awesome it will be adopted by the masses. So far it looks like OpenID is still at the begin. Good for OpenID that now is on MySpace. But we should be happy when the approach will be active supported by the users.
That is great news… OpenID still has a long way to go… but it is being adopted by a lot of big name sites
What’s taking them so long? At the now dead/zombie start-up naked, I implemented OpenID into the existing authentication in the space of about 2-3 days, straight after I joined them.
I too share my frustration with others who commented here about the big companies all clamouring to provide OpenIDs rather than accept OpenIDs from other services.
You say “The integration work on accepting OpenIDs from others is harder, and the payoff is less.” …but umm, sorry to break it to you, but it can be done in less than an hour for a new site and in a couple hours with any site. The OpenID libraries from JanRain are easily accessible and open source so it’s easy to see how it works and any decent coder can see it or tweak it in less than a work day. You can even make a consumer script from scratch pretty quickly too.
Ever since I got an OpenID, I’ve stopped signing up for accounts at sites that aren’t OpenID consumers. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it was just…that I didn’t want to bother anymore with new accounts and if a site can’t accomodate me on a small level like this, then I just don’t have the time for them. That’s how I feel.
There are enough good OpenID providers, we need to see some big names step up the plate and start accepting instead of just issuing it. The big news will be when that starts happening.
Its a good thing when you consider that as more people learn how to use openid
they figure out they only need one account and it gives people choice
These companies all should accept OpenID’s but I suspect that as more people use their own OpenID’s from their provider of choice more people will expect that sites allow them to use those accounts
The problem is not there are many providers and not enough consumers. The problem is the providers can not provide authenticated information. For example I will be interested in a user’s age or geographical location. None of them can provide. Hence poor adoption among consumers.
I’ve been following OpenID for years. Surprised that Microsoft Cardspace hasn’t come in to take it on yet. While I applaud the influence “early adopters” like Myspace will have on the initiative, the land grab and lack of accepting OpenID logins deflates the situation completely. How lame to issue and not accept!
I hate to say this because I respect the people involved but OpenID is not providing much value to it’s users. Bidirectional updating of personal information on social nets (among many other things) is what people want. People use the same user/pass on most sites anyway. Let’s get cracking on this, taking waaay to long to get OpenID going. Maybe get Arrington to work on the problem when he gets bored with the TC flatpanel PC
I am a big advocate for OpenID, and in the last few weeks it has helped me emensily. However, I would have to agree with Aswath. The problem for OpenID are the hassles over the authentication credentials needed by the provider. I think OpenID would be smart to pursue a partnership with Verisign or another established signer in the marketplace so it can quickly excelerate and become more accepted by consumers. Geotrust (now Verisign), used to have a really cheap personal cert. I see OpenID taking it’s place.
-Maxine
Surprise surprise, another implementor that only does half the job, happy to be the authority but no way will they listen to anyone else… gotta protect all those accounts you can sell to teh advertisers. http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/.....rve_Better
Good to see more services using OpenID, needs to be more I feel.