OpenID Gets A Massive Boost
Posted by Nick O'Neill on January 17th, 2008 10:41 AM
Over a year ago I began spending a lot of time focusing on the OpenID standard. I went so far as to say that 2007 would be the year of OpenID. Within a month of my article the buzz had died down and there appeared to be no support behind the movement. Large companies including AOL sent out press releases stating their support of the standard which simply meant that you could use their site as your OpenID provider. Nobody wanted to accept OpenID as a way to login.
Today big news came out from Yahoo who announced their support of OpenID as a format for logging in. This is a big win for the movement supporters. This is a huge first step toward the organization of identity on the web. OpenID provides users with a single login that works across multiple unaffiliated websites. With the recent announcement that Facebook and other social networks have joined the data portability work group, the buzz has been increasing.
As Caroline McCarthy points out, one major downfall of the OpenID standard is that it does not provide a “central repository for identity management.” That’s a major issue and as such OpenID is just a first step toward a web in which identity is effectively managed and portable. It appears as though 2008 may turn out to be the year that web identity gets pushed to the forefront. This is a huge step in the right direction and Yahoo deserves the recognition. Do you think we’ll begin to see portable identities in 2008?
January 23rd, 2008 at 10:40 am
[…] shaping up to be a ground-shifting year in regards to data portability. Just last week Yahoo announced that they would begin supporting OpenId as a login […]
February 7th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
[…] is the year that OpenID is laying it on strong. They started out the year with Yahoo announcing their support and then today OpenID announced that Google, Yahoo, IBM and VeriSign will become […]
March 27th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
[…] but don’t expect all of the big players to adopt the standards anytime soon. While Yahoo! has accepted OpenID as a standard for logging in, not all of the other players like Facebook have accepted this format. […]