I think one of my all-time favorite quotes is when Brad Fitzpatrick was referring to why he implemented OpenID. “I just wanted to make the Internet suck less.” (man I hope I’m not screwing that up)
A lot of really smart people have been trying to crack the single sign-on nut for quite some time. Its a hard problem. Somebody has to take a stab at it. Somebody had to do it. To me, a technology like this is something that is really going to enable Web 2.0. Its great that we’ve got all of these sites out there that do some amazing things, but do I really need another username and password combination to remember?! (Who is that other ‘kveton’ out there that keeps taking my username btw!!)
“Google, Yahoo and Microsoft will never adopt this!” you say. True. Possibly. The fact is, those sites have had quite a bit of their valuation placed on them by the number of users they have. Giving up “ownership” of the users would be bad in their case. But I disagree.
If you could quickly and easily participate in conversations on the web, wouldn’t that be great? No more registration screens. Period. You’d just login with your OpenID and be off and running. You could comment on blogs easier. Give props to some guy who just did a sweet video on YouTube. Share your photos with your family easier. (yes, I just said ’sweet’; in my defense I was talking about YouTube). Most of the sites in the long tail don’t have “manage user accounts” in their mission statements. OpenID is the platform that helps these sites focus on their main thing.
So why on earth would Technorati want to support this emerging technology? The blogosphere is curious too. Well, they are a company that tracks blogs. And OpenID was pioneered by Brad Fitzpatrick who works at a pretty big blog company. To me it makes perfect sense.
But really. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to get the ball rolling on user-centric identity before the big players ace all of the smaller guys out of the game. At the end of the day, the Internet officially sucks less in my eyes.
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October 20, 2006 at 9:01 am
Ian Thomas
Open ID sounds great, except for one thing. What happens when your service provides decides to stop providing Open ID? Do you lose access to all your accounts that use that Open ID?
It also seems to be a massive target for phishing attacks, should the likes of eBay start using it.
October 20, 2006 at 10:06 am
snarfed.org
agreed, this is a great step. props to technorati, along with livejournal and the rest of the open-minded early adopters.
full disclosure, my main motivation for posting here is to test out pyblosxom\’s new openid support, which i\’ve just finished and checked in. i\’ve tested locally, of course, but this is the first live test. fingers crossed!
oh, and no promises, but i\’ll see what i can do about openid at google…
October 20, 2006 at 1:47 pm
kveton
Ian: Yes, you have to choose your service provider very carefully today. However, you’re not the only person to have asked this question. There are a couple of possibilities for how we solve this once-and-for-all but its a question of hashing them out in the community, developing it in the specification and then writing the code.
As for phishing, I couldn’t agree more. There are several folks working on browser extensions to help alleviate this pain (Sxip is working on one I know for sure and ooTao already has one out). Discussions have also been had with Mozilla about directly integrating support for OpenID into the browser (this would be basically leveraging the anti-phishing stuff in Firefox already).