tags: OpenID

Turns out that 37 Signals’ implementation of OpenID could use some… getting real.

Let me go over these issues and provide either resources or remedies.

Look at these three URLs and make a note to yourself about any differences you see:

To a lay person (or even your average geek), these URLs all represent the same thing — especially if you type any of them into the address bar, they’ll land you on my out-of-date homepage.

I'm on the boards of the OpenID and Open Web Foundations, and work at Google.

I co-founded the BarCamp and coworking communities.

I maintain a blog and wiki, and can be found on Twitter, Flickr, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Foursquare, Tumblr and Facebook.

Working with Mozilla, I produced a concept on implementing identity in the browser called The Social Agent.

Portland, Oregon's JanRain, leaders in the OpenID movement, put on a PR push this week to promote what they say is the imminent approval of OpenID 2.0's final draft. Specifically, they say that they expect the final signatures to be penned on Monday at the upcoming Internet Identity Workshop.

Janrain maintains OpenID libraries for the developer community. Learn how to contribute. For more information about OpenID, an Internet Single-Sign-On protocol, visit wiki.openid.net.

As we continue to work on the code that will eventually become stackoverflow, we belatedly realized that we'd be contributing to the glut of username and passwords on the web. I have fifty online logins, and I can't remember any of them! Adding that fifty-first set of stackoverflow.com credentials is unlikely to help matters.

New Web-based services crop up at an astonishing rate. The problem is that with each new service, a new signup process with a unique username, password, and often bits of personally identifying information are required to create a new account. Not only is this process maddening in its repetitiveness, but also each account adds additional management overhead. OpenID allows users to have a single identifier that may be used to log onto every service ...

The buzz around OpenID is becoming impossible to ignore. If you don’t know why, check out How To Use OpenID, a screencast by Simon Willison. As it’s used now (unless I’m missing something) OpenID seems pretty useless, but with only a little work (unless I’m missing something) it could be very useful indeed.

Prompted by posts by Randy Reddig and Tony Stubblebine and a conversation with Elliott Kember, I wanted to address, yet again, the big fat stinking elephant in the room: OpenID usability and the paradox of choice.

Elliott proposed a pretty clear picture of what he thinks OpenID should look like on StackOverflow, given the relative value of each provider to him:

There are couple of big news items here. First, we read here that XRI 2.0 has been approved as Draft and released for public review and comments. The 2.0 version  has been developed to meet the needs of OpenID 2.0 (for a summary of changes, read this post by Drummond Reed). You may also recall my earlier post about OpenID 2.0 and how it relates to XRI and other protocols. For now, know that OpenID is the umbrella framework that covers OpenID 1.x, XRI and ...

Decentralized online identification system OpenID can log you into thousands of social networking sites (and counting) using a single username and password. OpenID asserts who you are by proving you own a URL—not an email address, not a password, not your mother's maiden name, just a URL that must be confirmed by both the accepting site and OpenID host. No more filling out web site registration forms! Now that sounds wonderful to those of us sick...