OSCON, OpenID and Convergence

Oh man!! This week is gonna be a hoot!! OSCON is here in our stomping grounds and its already shaping up to be a blast!

I have been chatting with people here in Portland as folks have trickled in for the conference and a frequent theme that I’ve heard is that “OpenID is just the Web 2.0 folks giving the finger to the big guys.” Hmm. Well, personally, I’m not that crass … ha! Seriously though, I think this is a good point and one I’d like to address here.

At the outset, OpenID was really a very simple idea; make it so you can login to multiple websites without having to create a new account if you want to comment on a blog or a forum. Wow. That’s pretty simple. Too simple some might say. Well, it meets a largish chunk of use-cases for a specific type application. Great.

Today, the story for OpenID is much richer as the specification has matured. OpenID v2.0 is looking to be a very solid platform that addresses many of the concerns people had with v1.0. OpenID v3.0 is making the tent even bigger and talks with some of the “big guys” are already happening in earnest.

Now, let’s look at where we’re at today and where OpenID v1.0 was less than a year ago. Take all of the people sitting around the OpenID table right now and go back to a year ago and say “create a simple, light-weight, decentralized protocol for doing authentication on the web”. Ugh. It most likely would not work.

Instead, we’re seeing a different approach. The simple specification got out there. People liked it (and some didn’t). It has changed. It’s evolving. It will continue to evolve. As the “big guys” work to make it simpler to integrate their stuff in general, we’ll be working to make it simple to integrate the “big guys” themes into something that is already simple. Do you see what I’m driving at here?

Is this the best method for adoption? Is this the best method for creating a user-centric protocol that can become ubiquitous? Is OpenID the best technology in the world? I can confidently say ‘No’ to all of those things. But for some reason, the train keeps moving forward, the tent keeps getting bigger.

Convergence is a journey. No beginning. No end. Today OpenID doesn’t meet all of the use cases. Tomorrow, it just might. As users use it, as we watch it mature, as people beat it up, as it changes, it will become a better platform because of it.