One of the blogs I subscribe to, John Panzer's Abstractioneer, recently had a post titled "Why AOL Should Go OpenID".
I can't say that I know a lot about OpenID right now. But I do know that a lot of people whose work and opinions I respect consider OpenID a very important development in this age where information created by individuals or about them is scattered across the Internet. My wife and I wrote a book about MySpace, and our research for the book brought the problem of Web presence and identity into focus for us.
Who's talking about OpenID?
O'Reilly Radar has published two posts about OpenID in recent months:
- "OpenID, Get it from Yahoo! & Avoid Phishing" talks about "a method for using your Yahoo ID with OpenID (unofficial, but sanctioned)"
- "OpenID on the Upswing" presents a Google Trends graph as part of the evidence that OpenID is gaining prominence.
A search for OpenID on Google News produces only a scattering of links as of today. But some of the entries talk about 2007 as being (possibly) the year in which OpenID will break out.
So, what is OpenID?
As I said, I've been thinking about the problem of scattered individual presence on the Internet and identity since we began work on our MySpace book. Throughout the book, we warn teens that what they post is forever out of their control, in a domain where every post is crawled and indexed and linked to and potentially copied and reposted, by spiders and by individuals. Not only are your own posts subject to this -- but posts about you created by other people are also indexed, potentially copied, etc. "Publish with care!" we warned them...
So, what's OpenID, and how might it help? OpenID
is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.
OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity.
Sounds interesting, doesn't it? You can also find out a lot about OpenID at the ClaimID blog. ClaimID is a startup that provides an OpenID-compliant solution that
lets you track, verify, classify, annotate, prioritize and share the information that is about you online.
I found out about ClaimID while we were working on our MySpace book, when I came across the Unit Structures blog, by Fred Stutzman. This is a very interesting blog for those of you who are interested in the world-changing nature and implications of technology, information, and social networks.
I'm hoping Fred will write an article for us, about OpenID and why we need it.
Should AOL Go OpenID?
Getting back to AOL and OpenID: in the Abstractioneer post, John Panzer states:
Identifying someone online is hard. Even solving the more limited problem of verifying that this person is the same person who you were socializing with yesterday online is not trivial. All social software has some mechanism for letting people verify some online identity -- usually a user name and password. Of course that just means that you have different user names for different services. In the new "Web 2.0" world, though, a primary rule is for services to be open and interoperate and play together. That's difficult if people have to remember that you're leetjedi67 on service A and urtha52 on service B.
This is the problem OpenID addresses. It's a problem that only grows as the Internet and Web presence become increasingly pervasive within people's daily lives. A lot of people are looking at OpenID today. Being someone who spent months studying the largest social network in its finest detail, to me John's logic that it would be good if AOL adopted OpenID is persuasive.
There's a lot more to talk about here, certainly. Stay tuned -- and let us know what your thoughts are, too!
-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media