AOL's OpenID Effort Goes (More) Public

You wouldn't really call it a formal corporate annoucement, but AOL's John Panzer's blog post "AOL and OpenID: Where we are" shows that AOL has already implemented OpenID to a far greater extent than anyone would have guessed:

• Every AOL/AIM user now has at least one OpenID URI, http://openid.aol.com/<sn>.
• This experimental OpenID 1.1 Provider service is available now and we are conducting compatibility tests.
• We're working with OpenID relying parties to resolve compatibility issues.
• Our blogging platform has enabled basic OpenID 1.1 in beta, so every beta blog URI is also a basic OpenID identifier. (No Yadis yet.)
• We don't yet accept OpenID identities within our products as a relying party, but we're actively working on it. That roll-out is likely to be gradual.
• We are tracking the OpenID 2.0 standardization effort and plan to support it after it becomes final.

As AOL has done with other new ventures such as AIM Pages, the company is leveraging its AIM user base to instantly create what may be the Internet's largest OpenID domain. Every AIM user now "has" OpenID (just as every AIM user has an AIM page).

If you go to any AIM user's AOL OpenID page (for example, mine: http://openid.aol.com/kevinfarnham1), you are redirected to the person's AIM Page.

I'll be writing more about this soon. In addition, we'll be publishing an article in the next few days about OpenID written by Fred Stutzman, co-founder of ClaimID.com.

This is indeed an exciting moment for AOL.

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media