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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Written on June 18, 2008 – 1:14 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
The Open Flow Track sessions at Supernova 2008 just beg for a flood of buzzwords. You can’t avoid them when you’re discussing topics like Social Graph’s, Network business models and Bottom-up distribution Openness. Words like “collaborative”, “engage”, “social networks”, and “OpenID” keep flying around in Room 4 of the Wharton West.
That didn’t go unnoticed by the moderator of the Bottom-up distribution Openness panel Jeremy Keith (Adactio), so he decided to give a funny twist with a customized Buzzword Bingo page.
Leah Culver (Pownce), Chris Messina (Citizen Agency), David Recordon (Six Apart), and Tantek Celik thought of it as very funny and happily played along - although Leah didn’t immediately realized that every attendee had a different card. After Keith reminded her in a witty way that having different cards is quite vital for playing the game, he explained that you can refresh the page as many times as you want. He has even built a buzzword generator.
Fun way to spice up a panel! (a phenomenon I still hate though)
Written on March 12, 2008 – 2:01 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Last night ClickPass has launched. ClickPass is a single-click-signon service that works on top of OpenID. The extra service that ClickPass offers is that you don’t have to remember your OpenID account, Clickpass does that for you. ClickPass is a Y Combinator start-up, which probably explains why some of the other Y startups already support their service.
You can use ClickPass to combine your logins for the services you use, like LiveJournal and WordPress. For each service ClickPass generates a new account which connects to the services account.
ClickPass is not without controversies, it makes use of the OpenID standard but adds a new ‘user discovery service’ on top of it. That service is not based on a standard. OpenID advocates would have liked to see ClickPass adopt a discovery standard like ‘SAML idp discovery’. ClickPass has not reacted on that. This issue will probably soon be addressed since OpenID’s chairmember, Scott Kveton, is also a member of the ClickPass board.
Besides not adopting standards ClickPass has some other downsides. (more…)
Written on February 7, 2008 – 8:05 pm
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur
Today Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as board members. The OpenID Foundation board is there to “to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community”. OpenID is really exploding in the last couple of months. With Google and Yahoo! becoming official OpenID providers, the OpenID movement has grown to billions of users. Now the Big Five have announced to not only support OpenID as a provider but also actively help to develop the standard furthermore.
Earlier this year OpenID 2.0 has been released. This is a serious landmark in removing the burdon for web users to store loads of password and username combinations. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.
In Europe the OpenID Europe Foundation is gathering more and more local OpenID providers to team up. Snorri Giorgetti, founder of the OpenID Europe Foundation, says Europe now contains 17 OpenID providers, varying from France to Estonia. The European Foundation is not directly connected to the OpenID foundation but is there to promote OpenID in the member countries and to support the OpenID consumer websites on a technical level.
Written on January 31, 2008 – 12:11 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
The Yahoo! OpenID (beta) which was announced earlier this month has just been launched. You can try it out right away. This is expected to move the OpenID movement ahead considerably. All 250 million members of Yahoo are now able to log in to any website, not just Yahoo, that supports OpenID 2.0.
At this moment you can find very limited list at Yahoo which I hope will be expanded soon.
I have been testing OpenID login with Wordpress.com who also offers OpenID. Right now it seems Wordpress has a more attractive offer than Yahoo. At Yahoo my OpenID URL is:
https://me.yahoo.com/a/rEOH03k2oZKSWDlu_x22Z12oud0-
While at Wordpress.com it is:
http://bomega.wordpress.com
I think I prefer the Wordpress version…
UPDATE: It is possible to change your Yahoo identifier URL into something more easy to remember. I overlooked this possibility when I checked the service yesterday. This means that my Yahoo identifier is now https://me.yahoo.com/openidboris. I still think http://bomega.wordpress.com is easier to remember. Thank you Adam for pointing this out to me.
Written on July 19, 2007 – 4:52 pm
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Dick Hardt, the CEO of Identity2.0 company Sxipper gave an amazing presentation about the future of online identity. He has a great presentation style and did 804 slides in 29 minutes and 4 seconds! It is not only a very good presentation but he addresses a very interesting field for the future of the web as well; our online identity. It is a very popular topic at the moment (think of OpenID).
Thanks Dick for this great performance and for inspiring us!
enjoy
Keynote: Dick Hardt - The Next Identity, the Hardt Way (more…)
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