Scott Kveton

State of OpenID – April 2007: By the numbers

It being April 2nd (btw – thanks for all of the crazy stop-my-heart OpenID posts yesterday) I thought it would be a great time to give an update on the “State of OpenID”. I’m going to try to do this every few months (like once a quarter) as people keep asking me for graphs and numbers and I might as well just blog about it and let folks take it from there.

Now this isn’t the final word, I just thought I would gather a few statistics as well as talk about where we’re at as a community. Your mileage may vary … by all means, comment below.

(Full disclosure: I run a company called JanRain which is participating in the OpenID community by developing open source libraries as well as developing sites like MyOpenID and Jyte.)

Adoption continues: The last three months have seen some amazing adoption rates. AOL and WordPress have come up as OpenID providers. Sites like 37signal’s Highrise, AOL’s Ficlets and Ziki have come along with strong support for OpenID. Digg and Netvibes also announced support coming in the next few months.
User totals: With the addition of AOL’s 63 million users, it puts the OpenID enabled user eco-system somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 million users. Now, not all of these users know they have an OpenID yet but hopefully that will change over time.

More sites coming on-line: From the perspective of MyOpenID.com we’ve seen over 2000 unique OpenID enabled sites September 2005. The vast majority of these have come in the last three months. These numbers take into account things like unreachable hosts, non-existent domains and strange ports, etc. This number is currently growing at 25 – 30 new sites a day and has continued at 5 – 7% growth week-over-week for the past 3 months. (See graph)
OpenID 2.0 continues to bake: OpenID 2.0 continues to bake with Sxip Identity releasing open source libraries for Java and Perl. JanRain recently announced the release candidate for Python with PHP and Ruby close behind. As more people begin to use the libraries and vet the latest version of OpenID, I think we’ll get closer to the much anticipated “final” version. OpenID Attribute Exchange also continues to come along as well.
More servers than sites: A strong theme across the OpenID eco-system is that so many sites are coming up as just providers and not consumers. So you can use your account as an OpenID but you can’t bring your existing OpenID in from another site to login.
Integrated social networking: Sites like videntity and claimID are now hooking together OpenID and microformats to help provide for the first distributed social networking schemes. These are the seeds of something really exciting; the ability to tie single sign-on with portable social networking means we can quickly login to any site and then pull our social networks along with us. Its going to take time and quite a bit more work to get sites to adopt a standardized means for doing this but its inevitable now that OpenID is taking hold.

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About The Author

kveton

2nd

April 2007

bykveton
posted in Identity, JanRain, OpenID
3 Comments »

3 Comments Add Yours ↓

The upper is the most recent comment

mxcl #

04.04.2007 10:37
1
It would be great if we started getting more consumers and less servers. As I wonder if it may just get confusing if everyone can serve. Especially if nobody consumes!

Crossing fingers for the future.
Ryan #

04.04.2007 17:37
2
I believe OpenID’s flaw isn’t technological, it’s mental. We need to get get past Diffie-Hellman and look at Deleuze-Guattari, etc.

People are stuck on a hierarchical model with a few trusted providers and that is resulting in competition to be one of those providers we see today.

OpenID needs to be distributed, p2pID. Unlimited identities linked together in flexible ways. I babbled about it last week.

http://www.shadydentist.com/wordpress/archives/2007/03/26/changing-openids-metaphor-to-p2pid/
Oxa Koba #

08.01.2007 20:53
3
Regarding “Integrated Social Networking”:

The community at Microformats.org have taken up the issue of Social Network Portabilty ( http://microformats.org/wiki/social-network-portability ).

Because OpenID is involved in the conversation (and rightly so), I hope that you can encourage people from the OpenID community to get involved.

Particularly of note, I think someone more technically savy may need to clarify the role of persona’s in the interchange of data during the OpenID process.

State of OpenID – April 2007: By the numbers

About The Author

kveton

2nd

April 2007

3 Comments Add Yours ↓

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