Posted at 11:20 pm on November 26, 2008 by David Recordon
As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, President-elect Obama’s website Change.gov now supports OpenID sign in for commenting on certain blog posts and sections of their site. Change.gov uses Intense Debate to power their comment who recently relaunched with OpenID support. As ReadWriteWeb wrote:
Every other major player that has announced support for OpenID has in fact only allowed accounts with their company to be used as an OpenID elsewhere – they have not allowed other OpenIDs to be used to log in to their own sites. That means Barack Obama is cooler than AOL, MySpace, Google and Yahoo!. Maybe you already knew that, though.
Intentional or not, it’s great to see OpenID continue to be built into tools used all over the web whether it be Open Source development frameworks, OS X Leopard, or hosted services like Intense Debate. Putting OpenID in front of such a mainstream audience will certainly continue pushing the community down the path of smoothing out OpenID’s user experience.
Tags: adoption
This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted at 9:14 pm on November 25, 2008 by David Recordon
Last month at the first Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting in New York, several media companies and affinity groups identified two desired areas for improvement around OpenID: the user experience as it reaches mainstream adoption and the increased ability to exchange profile information given user consent. Since then, the OpenID Foundation, its members and the wider community have been working hard to understand what it will take to make OpenID more usable by mainstream users and why the larger OpenID Providers have not been quick to support OpenID Attribute Exchange.
As a quick aside, AOL has just launched My MapQuest which sports a great new OpenID login experience. It’s worth noting that in the process of signing up for a MapQuest account using OpenID, you’re also creating what seems to be an account at AOL too. Additionally, AOL requests profile information from your OpenID Provider meaning that in some cases you’re able to sign up for a new account without having to type your email address, name, nickname, etc. AOL is the first large internet company to support OpenID sign in on a non-blogging product and while they don’t yet let you use your OpenID to sign in on AOL.com, it’s seems clear that is the direction they’re headed.
From the user experience front, Yahoo! hosted the first OpenID User Experience Summit where nearly forty people came together sharing what they’ve learned around usability, user experience, and various interface designs for OpenID and OAuth. In the following weeks, more work has been underway focused on implementations that improve the intuitiveness of OpenID registration and login. At the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View the week before last, sessions were held around many different aspects of OpenID; technical, business and user experience, among others.
The general approach to improving user experience over the past year has been the idea of graphically representing various larger OpenID Providers. The main critique is that it will only scale to a fixed number of providers since not every logo can be displayed. That said, it represents the approach taken on an increasing number of OpenID enabled sites, by Facebook Connect, and is being productized by companies such as JanRain with their RPX interface.
As Google continues their usability research around federated login, they’ve built a login widget which allows the user to enter their email address and say that they don’t have a password but need help logging in. This then allows the site to see if they recognize the email address within their own login database or if it belongs to a domain such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com which also acts as an OpenID Provider. The ability to use an email addresses within OpenID is currently a highly discussed topic that is leading to the formation of a new technical working group to better understand the motivations and challenges, while also proposing a technology solution.
On the data side, Yahoo! has just announced a controlled beta of support for the Simple Registration extension (SREG) which provides full name, nickname, email address, gender, language, and timezone if the user chooses to share it. AOL has also just announced preview support for SREG profile information transfer of email, nickname, country, date of birth, gender, and postal code if the user chooses to share it. Additionally, Google’s OpenID Provider supports the transfer of a validated gmail.com email address via Attribute Exchange if the user chooses to share it. This trend of being able to more easily and securely exchange profile information via OpenID is one that we expect to increase through 2009.
Tags: adoption, attribute exchange, simple registration, usability, user experience
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted at 8:59 pm on November 3, 2008 by Brian Kissel
The OpenID Foundation is pleased to share that OpenID Japan has launched with 32 members including merchants, portals, educational institutions, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, airlines, and banks.
This announcement is significant for several reasons:
The number and breadth of industries represented by the new members The use of OpenID by member companies for commercial transactions Collaboration between OpenID Japan and Liberty Alliance Japan An earlier survey by internet.com and Marsh Research of Japanese internet users found that 28% of knew about OpenID and 15% were using OpenID
Congratulations to OpenID Japan on these significant milestones.
Tags: openid
This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 8:59 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
