OpenID

OpenID. What is it? What does it do? Never even heard of it you say? Well let me try and get you in the know real quick.

I’ve been a proponent of open technologies for as long as I can remember being an adult. So whenever I see one that makes sense I try to back it all the way. OpenID per its Wikipedia page is a decentralized single sign-on system. If you are a user of systems like Yahoo!, Google, MySpace, or Vox you know that you may have access to a number of different services (i.e. e-mail, blog, photos, groups) that you can access with your one account. Instead of having to use your username and password to gain access to all of the different services your “presence” is shared between them to allow you to just enter one time. While this is a very closed since of the true meaning of single sign-on you get what I’m saying. The problem is that if I have a Myspace blog and you have a Vox blog, we would have to also have accounts on the other systems in order to truly communicate and coorespond. After a while you find yourself having a Multiply, Yahoo!, Google, Vox, Facebook, Myspace and more account when you might only use a few of them if that many. It can quickly turn into a big hassle.

In comes OpenID. The basis and spirit of the concept is why have all of these systems with duplicate user information when you can setup rules for each service provider to follow to allow for the exchange of user identification between them. I.E if I have a Yahoo! account and I read your blog on Google, I should be able to leave a comment as myself on Yahoo!, not have to create an account on Google that I will never really use. To use some really basic terminology, Yahoo! (where you have your account) would be the IdP (Identification Provider). Google (the Relay Agent) communicates with Yahoo! and sees if you are who you really are. If the check passes you are able to interact with the RA (Google) services in a predefined way (i.e. leave a blog comment). This is a very high level look at what OpenID is and what it can do. But the jest is you can have an account on one service and use it to interact with other services.

While Google and Yahoo! aren’t full IdPs and RAs yet, you can get an OpenID right now. You may already have one and not even know it. Here are a list of some Providers and Agents just to give you a heads up:

Providers
myOpenID.com – Free hosted OpenID server and provider of mine
VeriSign’s PIP – Free OpenID Provider which integrates 2nd factor authentication via token login among other mechanisms
idproxy.net – allows you to use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
Vox.com – provides an identifier to every user of their system. So you can make Blogger comments with your Vox id
AOL.com – provides and identifier to AOL and AIM accounts.
WordPress.com – WordPress.com provides an OpenID to anyone with a blog hosted there.

Agents
Blogger – Make Blogger comments with your OpenID Identifier
Dopplr – Online Service for frequent travelers. Share future travel plans.
FoodCandy – Ultimate foodie restaurants and cooking guide
The Wine Spies – Cool Wine Info Site
Twitter Feed – Lets you create Twitter Notifications for you new blog posts
Plaxo – Super Contact and and Calendar site

To find out more about OpenID go to www.openid.net