OpenID, I want to love it but…
Written on February 7, 2007 by Conor O'Neill
I’ve followed a lot of the happenings with OpenID over the past nine months or so. I signed up to a few of the providers (Verisignlabs and MyOpenID) and I used it successfully to log on to Zooomr.
Two announcements caught my eye since yesterday. First Microsoft announced they are going to support it - well done Kim Cameron and gang. Second, the ClaimID guys have announced a change of direction and they are going to be an OpenID provider too.
So, by my reckoning we have the following providers of OpenID:
- Verisign
- MyOpenID
- Typekey
- Technorati
- ClaimID
- Who else?
Now for the important bit - useful sites that let you login using your OpenID credentials. Emmmmmmmmmm
- Zooomr
- Ma.gnolia
- Jyte
- LiveJournal
- Annnnnnnnnddddddddd?
Is the balance ever so slightly off here? Should the second list not be in the thousands?
Even worse, whilst Technorati are an OpenID provider, they won’t let you use OpenID to log on to their site. Not only that, but as with so much of Technorati recently (and it pains me to say it as I love them), I couldn’t use my Technorati profile to log on to Jyte (”There was an error with the request. Please try again later.”)
On the upside, I’ve always been a big fan of Fred and the ClaimID guys and one of their new features is wonderful. By adding two lines to the header of my various blogs, I can now login to OpenID-enabled sites using http://www.argolon.com or http://blog.loudervoice.com. Now I don’t even have to remember one URL. I am the URL. Aside: This worked on Ma.gnolia and Jyte but not on Zooomr.
The key feature ALL OpenID-enabld sites need to support is the ability to let me login using OpenID and then let me associate an existing non-OpenID login with that identity. Ma.gnolia and Jyte both do this slickly. It doesn’t even seem to be possible in LiveJournal, when I logged in using OpenID, it gave me a new account. And I cannot figure out if there is a way of linking a TypeKey account to an external OpenID identity. This is from the people who invented OpenID!
Despite all the apparent support and buzz, OpenID will remain a techie novelty until we see a huge increase in the number of sites that support it. C’mon Yahoo, do it, do it.
And no more OpenID providers, enough already!
Technorati Tags: OpenID, ClaimID, Jyte, MyOpenID, Verisignlabs, Zooomr, Ma.gnolia, TypeKeySix Apart
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The openid-enabled sites are coming! The market will follow the networks. At least that’s what I hope. Thanks for the kind words btw.
Nicely put Argolon. Google (GMail, GCal, GReader, GAnalytics etc.) and Yahoo! (Flickr and Delicious) need to support it. Also I am not sure if the Microsoft support extends to their Live strategy?
My concern stems from the fact that v1 has been out there a long time as have the libraries but beyond lots and lots of talk, I see very few sites enabling it e.g. how long has it been since Wikipedia started talking about it, last June?
Good points Conor but isn’t this the usual pattern with any bootstrap - ie. it follow an exponential curve of sorts. Something like Metcalfe’s law? What I think we’re seeing now is, at long last, a movement out of the flat part of the curve.
Marc Canter has been expressing frustration with SixApart because, while *supporting* OpenID they’re not actively promoting it. He’s right, that’s what’s needed. But I think the momentum is there now that we can expect to see it grow immensely in the coming year. At least I hope. Because being able to say “I am the URL” is a proviso towards “I’m the application”.
I hope we are seeing genuine movement. They still have a job on their hands with explaining the idea to people tho. Being re-directed to another site to enter username/pw is going to be very confusing to a lot of people. From a user perspective it’ll be early adopter crowd only for quite a long time.
I’d be happy to use it but none of the sites I spend most of my time on allow me to logon using it or are likely to do so in the foreseeable future: N * Google Apps, del.icio.us, Flickr, Yahoo, Technorati, NetVibes, N * Wikis, N * Blogs (ok there is a WP plugin for comments), eBay, BaseCamp, Trac etc etc
Fingers crossed for at least one of them to do it and reduce my reliance on eWallet.
Your post convinced me it was time to sign up Conor (with ClaimID) and it was painless process but I’ve run into one problem. While my blog URL works fine my domain name, which is redirected to my blog, doesn’t. I get the following error - “Error retrieving identity URL: Fetching URL not allowed: ‘/?9d267478′”
I get that means I’ll have to do domain forwarding instead. I hope that works?
Hmm, worth posting a comment over at Fred’s blog about this?
http://www.conoroneill.com worked for me on some of the sites but not on Zooomr where I had to use http://www.claimid.com/conoro
I actually wrote this post after reading Marc’s post and doing some more research myself. I find the Six Apart position strange, maybe it’s just a resource limitation, I assume Vox is taking up huge effort - but still no raw HTML mode or support for microformats
I do have to point out that I have never successfully logged into People Aggregator using Sxip or OpenID and I just tried again a few moments ago.
[...] OpenID, I want to love it but… [...]
[...] But I’m genuinely concerned that if this trend of companies only being providers doesn’t change, OpenID will end up just being another one of those great ideas that never quite caught on. Thankfully, other people are noticing this as well. Conor over at Argolon put up a great entry about this problem. [...]
Of course then you have the other problem.
I decided to post a comment on LoveShack in reply to their post which linked here. They have the OpenID plug-in for Wordpress enabled so I thought I’d give it a spin. Total failure.
If I use my own URLs, it cannot find an end-point and if I use either my ClaimID or VerisignLabs URLs, I get “bad signature”.
We’re still an long way from seamless it seems.
Finally logged in using the MyOpenID URL!
to add to the public provider list, mylid.net & http://www.protectnetwork.org
related to the lack of SPs, is this (http://connectid.blogspot.com/2007/02/sampling-openid-rps.html)
So they are all running flat out to get OpenID v2.0 out the door before v1.0 is even fully interoperable?
I’m even more pessimistic now.