I've over the last months done a number of posts on the emerging de-facto standard for internet authentification OpenID. Now the OpenID Foundation is announcing that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have taken seats as the organization's first corporate board members.OpenID is appealing as it allows users to authenticate their identity through a single chosen provider instead of creating unique accounts at every website you use. Today, more than 10 000 web sites and 350 million users use OpenID.
For users, OpenID means much easier account creation, better personalization, privacy and security when trying out new web sites. It makes for a greatly improved user experience. For websites and other companies, OpenID means more and happier users and potentially greater access to information about those users.
There's a whole lot of momentum right now for OpenID. As I've previously told, in January Yahoo! increased the number of OpenID enabled user accounts by orders of magnitude, the long-awaited OpenID 2.0 spec was just recently finalized and the entire Data Portability paradigm is moving into the public consciousness quickly.
All of that said, big vendors have a lot of short term interest in controlling identity silos. It won't be easy to get their long term interests in openness to prevail. Fortunately, they are participating but are in the minority on the OpenID Foundation board.
There are many, many places you can get an OpenID and there are significant differences in advanced feature sets. To get a good look at the range of options and details beyond mere simple one-way authentication, check out the vendor comparison at SpreadOpenID.org.
0 kommentarer:
Post a Comment