AOL & OpenID - Status Update

It's been a long time since we started saying we are going to support 3rd party OpenID logins into AOL Web Properties. I am sure everyone would be thinking what's going on (apart from a few who might have accidentally seen the OpenID login tab on AOL Account Management Site :-) ). So here is the scoop. We did finish the infrastructure work on the AOL login side, required to support 3rd party OpenID users to login into AOL, but being a pretty big company, we are struggling to get our Product teams to support it. But they are as usual busy implementing cool new features and functionality into their products that they haven't yet experimented with OpenID support yet via OpenAuth and internal AOL Authentication System (called Screen Name Service). Since the AOL Account Management site is something in our control, we went ahead and added OpenID support to it - even though user's cannot really do anything in there apart from changing their profile information.


We currently support OpenIDs from the following OpenID providers:

1. myopenid.com
2. claimid.com
3. livejournal.com
4. verisignlabs.com
5. myvauthid.com
6. openid.sun.com
7. myvidoop.com
8. signon.com (*)
9. idtail.com (*)
10. xlogon.net (*)
11. idproxy.net (**)
12. typekey.com (**)
13. sxipper.com (**)
14. alwaysknownas.com (**)
15. myID.net (***)

(* - added to the whitelist on 8/16 ** - added to the whitelist on 8/20 *** - added to whitelist on 10/30)

We are open to accept OpenIDs from other providers too - so please contact us via AOL Developer Site with your information.

There has been no change to the AOL OpenIDs, all AOL/AIM users can still use their AOL ScreenNames as their OpenID (http://openid.aol.com/<screenname>).

We will soon update the OpenAuth documentation with some new changes.  Here is a quick list of some of them (already implemented and deployed on our production servers):

• You can request OpenAuth login page to show AOL, ICQ and OpenID login forms as required (anyone of them or combination of them or all)
• New mini version of Login page that would fit on mobile browsers
• OpenAuth Login page is now iPhone compatible too !
• OpenID Relying Party support, so Web-Apps integrating with OpenAuth do not need to worry about implementing multiple protocols.

We will let you know as soon as we an AOL Service that starts accepting 3rd Party OpenIDs  - well apart from ficlets.com and circavie.com, which already support OpenIDs but without using OpenAuth.