OpenID 2.0 final: What does that mean?

Last week at the Internet Identity Workshop, OpenID 2.0 Authentication and OpenID Attribute Exchange 1.0 were both declared final. This has been a long time coming but it certainly worth the wait.

Okay, great. Now what? Adoption is going to be the key. Chris calls out his shit, wish and hitlist for 2008 and he’s dead-on. We’ll get there, but its this type of grassroots evangelism is what we need. We’re a long way from where we want/need to be, but not to worry.

OpenID to me has always been a key component to what the “open web” is all about. Its a building block. Just like microformats or OAuth. There are a lot more to come. We’re just getting started here. We already have the basic vocabulary we need now to do some very interesting things. OpenID, OAuth and microformats set the stage. 2008 will be about some of the exciting things this empowers as well as the next generation of technologies, standards and tools.

With the crazy high valuations and talk about all of this social networking stuff, people literally forget to talk about the the consumers and what this means to them. The “open web” is all about the consumer and they will be the winner in all of this. It won’t be Facebook, it won’t be MySpace, etc. Data wants to be free. Users want choice. That means not only will the consumer win, there will be unbelievable competition in this market. Nothing bad can come from that … :-)