MapQuest supports OpenID

In Feb. 2007, John Panzer's blog post on "AOL and OpenID, Where we are" excited the blogoshere with the annoucement of AOL's support for OpenID as an OpenID Provider. In looking back at my own blog post, Eve Maler left a comment regarding when AOL would support OpenID as a relying party (RP). I'm happy to announce that while it's a little overdue, today's the day!

Today, MapQuest launched a new capability called 'My MapQuest' that allows users to save addresses, maps, directions, calculate fuel costs, etc for easy retrieval no matter where the user is on the web. One great aspect of this new service is that it supports OpenID as a Relying Party. Now any user with with an OpenID can use this new service. No longer will the user have to create a specific MapQuest or AOL account. We are excited to be one of the first major service providers to support OpenID as a relying party.

We do however, realize that there is still a long road ahead regarding user experience and consistency across products, providers and users. AOL is committed to working on the best experience for users. One issue we face at AOL is that our OpenID support is still based on OpenID 1.x. This limits the number of OpenID providers we can work with. So we are actively working to support the OpenID 2.0 specification.

We look forward to feedback and working with the industry in continuing to make OpenID valuable to users.