Jimdo: Pages AND OpenID to the people
Written on June 23, 2008 – 3:00 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the little OpenID incident at Next08 in May? I promised Andreas Stephan from Six Groups that I would blog about his service, if he would make OpenID support his top priority. Well, so it happened, and on June 6th, Six Group integrated OpenID login. Apparently, that has inspired another big German start-up as well, since Oliver Moser from Jimdo mailed me that his service also supports OpenID now.
Jimdo is an online Ajax-based website builder, which makes it easy for basically anyone to create a slick-looking page - sort of like an online iWeb. Their list of widgets is impressive, and Alexa tells us the service has been steadily growing. Here’s what Oliver has sent me:
From today on we’re supporting OpenID - but not as a provider, just as a host. Jimdo-users can now sign into their Jimdo-Page with their OpenID. But more important, they can use their personal Jimdo-Domain as an OpenID, even though Jimdo is not the provider. So if they comment on a blog post they can use their own domain - which of course makes a lot of sense.
You may wonder why Jimdo doesn’t act like a provider. Oliver has an answer to that question too: “There are already so many of then, so there’s no need for Jimdo being an additional one. And since OpenID enables Dataportability, we can actually make great use of it.”
Last week, some people at Supernova said OpenID and Dataportability have just become press releases machines. I can see why they say that, but I also think that it doesn’t hurt anyone (apart from our email inbox) since more and people will get familiar with the idea of open data. Also the less web-savvy ones, like most of the Jimdo users.
I hope you like that post!
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By maxi on Jun 23, 2008
Jeah. Jimbo roxxx
By Bob Boynton on Jun 24, 2008
Here is something that might help openid go. It is a service that associates your email address with an openid account. This is how they put it.
“Everyone’s identity is implicit, if not explicit, in their email address. This is why an email address works well for identity purposes when logging in to websites and applications. Our service, emailtoid, takes an email address and makes it work as an OpenID by mapping email addresses to URLs.”
http://emailtoid.net/
For many people the email address is much easier to remember — because it is used more often — than a url. However, it would probably require a more visible provider for many people to find it even though it is a pretty self-explanatory url.
By Ernst-Jan Pfauth on Jun 24, 2008
@Bob, wow that’s great. Gravatar has proven it works with avatars, so why not with email. Moreover, it makes perfect sense… email is an identifier already.