http://simonwillison.net/tags/openid/2011-01-25T16:17:54ZSimon Willison2011-01-25T16:17:54Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2011/Jan/25/signals/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://productblog.37signals.com/products/2011/01/well-be-retiring-our-support-of-openid-on-may-1.html">37signals Product Blog: We’ll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1</a>. The support costs far outweighed the benefits to customers, especially now that 37signals have their own single sign in mechanism that works across all of their products.</p> </div>

2010-09-03T08:50:19Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2010/Sep/3/vox/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://closing.vox.com/">Vox is closing on September 30, 2010</a>. One month seems like very short notice for closing a service of this size, especially since it functions as an OpenID provider so in addition to migrating their content away users may need to sign in to other services and set up an alternative form of authentication. UPDATE: From the comments, Vox accounts that migrate to TypePad will also have their OpenID migrated, and TypePad will continue to serve OpenID requests for old vox.com addresses. Smart solution.</p> </div>

2010-08-31T20:49:35Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2010/Aug/31/rasterweb/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://rasterweb.net/raster/2010/08/31/lanyrd/">RasterWeb: Lanyrd</a>. Pete Prodoehl calls me out on Lanyrd’s integration with the Twitter auth API at the expense of OpenID. I’ve posted a comment with my justification—essentially, tying to Twitter’s ecosystem means I can actually implement the features I’ve been talking about building on top of OpenID for years, with far less engineering effort.</p> </div>

2010-05-20T15:30:19Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2010/May/20/appengine/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2010/05/app-engine-at-google-io-2010.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A GoogleAppEngineBlog %28Google App Engine Blog%29">App Engine at Google I/O 2010</a>. OpenID and OAuth are now baked in to the AppEngine users API. They’re also demoing two very exciting new features—a mapper API for doing map/reduce style queries against the data store, and a Channel API for building comet applications.</p> </div>

2010-04-14T20:46:02Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2010/Apr/14/openid/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/04/openid-one-year-later/">Stack Overflow Blog: OpenID, One Year Later</a>. Google’s support is a huge deal—61% of Stack Overflow accounts use Google. Google’s implementation of directed identity has caused problems though, since Google provide a different OpenID for each domain making it hard for Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User to correlate accounts. Their solution is to require a (verified) e-mail address from Google OpenID users using sreg and use that as a key for the accounts.</p> </div>

2010-04-11T19:32:28Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2010/Apr/11/rfc/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5785.txt">RFC5785: Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers</a> (<a href="http://www.mnot.net/blog/2010/04/07/well-known" title="Mark Nottingham">via</a>). Sounds like a very good idea to me: defining a common prefix of /.well-known/ for well-known URLs (common metadata like robots.txt) and establishing a registry for all such files. OAuth, OpenID and other decentralised identity systems can all benefit from this.</p> </div>

2009-12-05T17:25:38Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Dec/5/yahoo/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/12/yahoo_openid_now_with_attribute_exchange.html?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=feed&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A YDNBlog %28Yahoo%21 Developer Network Blog%29">Yahoo! OpenID: Now with Attribute Exchange!</a>. The nice thing about this is that an e-mail address obtained from Yahoo! via attribute exchange has already been verified, so you don’t need to perform the e-mail roundtrip yourself. I expect a lot of OpenID consuming sites will end up with internal whitelists of OpenID providers who they trust to provide verified e-mail addresses, with users of sites not on the whitelist still getting e-mailed a verification link.</p> </div>

2009-09-25T21:08:21Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Sep/25/hybrid/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://openid.net/2009/09/25/more-powerful-and-easier-to-use/">OpenID: Now more powerful and easier to use!</a>. The OpenID+OAuth hybrid protocol (where a user can sign in with OpenID and grant an application access to their OAuth protected resources such as a contact list at the same time) is now supported by Google, Yahoo! and MySpace—this feels like OpenID finally coming of age.</p> </div>

2009-07-06T01:25:17Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Jul/6/amazonopenid/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://bit.ly/amazon-openid-demo">Evidence of OpenID at Amazon</a>. It looks like Amazon are using OpenID for SSO between their different properties—I clicked a link to sign in to AWS and the URL had OpenID query string parameters.</p> </div>

2009-06-13T17:01:00Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Jun/13/thefacebookdebacle/

<p>Today’s launch of <a href="http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23fufacebook">Facebook Usernames</a> provides an obvious and exciting opportunity for Facebook to become an OpenID provider. Facebook have clearly demonstrated their interest in becoming the key online identity for their users, and the new usernames feature is their acknowledgement that URL-based identities are an important component of that, no doubt driven in part by Twitter making usernames trendy again.</p> <p>It’s interesting to consider Facebook’s history with regards to OpenID and single sign on in general. When I started publicly advocating for OpenID <a href="http://simonwillison.net/2007/talks/">back in 2007</a>, my primary worry was that someone would solve the SSO problem in a proprietary way, irreparably damaging the decentralised nature of the Web—just as Microsoft had attempted a few years earlier with Passport.</p> <p>When Facebook Connect was announced <a href="http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=24577977130">a year ago</a> it seemed like my worst fears had become realised. Facebook Connect’s user experience was a huge improvement over OpenID—with only one provider, the sign in UI could be reduced to a single button. Their use of a popup window for the sign in flow was inspired—various usability studies have since shown that users are much more likely to complete a SSO flow if they can see the site they are signing in to in a background window.</p> <p>Thankfully, Facebook seem to understand that the industry isn’t willing to accept a single SSO provider, no matter how smooth their implementation. Mark Zuckerberg made reassuring noises about OpenID support at both <a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10063328-36.html">FOWA 2008</a> and <a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mark_zuckerberg_on_data_portab.php">SxSW 2009</a>, but things really stepped up earlier this year when <a href="http://openid.net/2009/02/05/facebook-joins-openid-foundation-board/">Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation Board</a> (accompanied by a substantial financial donation). Facebook’s board representative, <a href="http://www.sociallipstick.com/">Luke Shepherd</a>, is an excellent addition and brings a refreshingly user-centric approach to OpenID. Luke was previously responsible for much of the work on Facebook Connect and has been advocating OpenID inside Facebook for a long time.</p> <p>Facebook may not have committed to becoming a provider yet (at least not in public), but their decision to become a consumer first is another interesting data point. They may be trying to avoid the common criticism thrown at companies who provide but don’t consume—if they’re not willing to eat their own dog food, why should anyone else?</p> <p>At any rate, their consumer implementation is fascinating. It’s live right now, even though there’s no OpenID login box anywhere to be seen on the site. Instead, Facebook take advantage of the little known <a href="http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-2_0.html#anchor28">checkid_immediate mode</a>. Once you’ve associated your OpenID with your Facebook account (using the “Linked Accounts” section of the settings pane) Facebook sets a cookie remembering your OpenID provider, which persists even after you log out of Facebook. When you later visit the Facebook homepage, a checkid_immediate request is silently sent to your provider, logging you in automatically if you are already authenticated there.</p> <p>While it’s great to see innovation with OpenID at such a large scale, I’m not at all convinced that they’ve got this right. The feature is virtually invisible to users (it took me a bunch of research to figure out how to use it) and not at all intuitive—if I’ve logged out of Facebook, how come visiting the home page logs me straight back in again? I guess this is why Luke is keen on <a href="http://www.sociallipstick.com/2009/05/logout-the-other-half-of-the-identity-equation/">exploring single sign out with OpenID</a>. It sounds like the current OpenID consumer support is principally intended as a developer preview, and I’m looking forward to seeing how they change it based on ongoing user research.</p> <p>As OpenID provider implementation is an obvious next step that can’t be that far off—I wouldn’t be surprised to hear an announcement within a month or two.</p> <h3>HTTP redirect codes</h3> <p>As an aside, I decided to check that Facebook were using the correct 3xx HTTP status code to redirect from <a href="http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=666590500">my old profile page</a> to <a href="http://www.facebook.com/swillison">my new one</a>. I was horrified to discover that they are using a 200 code, followed by <a href="http://gist.github.com/129240">a chunk of JavaScript</a> to implement the redirect! The situation for logged out users is better but still fundamentally flawed: if you enable your public search listing (using an option tucked away on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=search">www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=search</a>) and <samp>curl -i</samp> your old profile URL you get a 302 Found, when the correct status code is clearly a 301 Moved Permanently.</p> <p>One final note: it almost goes without saying, but one of the best things about OpenID is that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.</p>

2009-06-11T09:46:15Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Jun/11/exclusive/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.dashes.com/anil/2009/06/the-future-of-facebook-usernames.html">Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames</a>. I have to admit I was planning to just let Facebook get on with it, assuming that the OpenID provider part would show up of its own accord—but maybe I should write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about it after all.</p> </div>

2009-04-20T04:10:33Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Apr/20/twitter/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Sign-in-with-Twitter">Sign in with Twitter</a>. Intriguing: Twitter are now an OpenID-style identity provider... using OAuth.</p> </div>

2009-02-16T22:22:27Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Feb/16/recover/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://stackoverflow.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/121262-recover-my-account-link-on-the-login-page">“Recover my account” link on the login page</a>. For the record, collecting and verifying e-mail addresses is a VERY good idea, even (especially?) if you accept OpenID. A verified e-mail address is still absolutely the best way to deal with lost passwords or “my OpenID isn’t working”.</p> </div>

2009-02-11T17:20:55Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Feb/11/plaxo/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/comcast_property_sees_92_success_rate_openid.php">Plaxo sees 92% success rate with OpenID/OAuth hybrid method</a>. Really wish I could have been at the OpenID UX Summit hosted by Facebook yesterday—sounds like an awful lot of important problems are being solved.</p> </div>

2009-02-06T00:19:51Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Feb/6/welcoming/

<div class="quote segment"><blockquote cite="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/02/04/welcoming-facebook-to-the-openid-foundation/"><p>... Facebook will be hosting the second User Experience Summit for OpenID on February 10th. The goal is to convene some of the best designers that leading internet companies can muster, and bring them together to develop a series of guidelines, best practices, iterations, and interfaces for making OpenID not just suck less, but become a great experience</p></blockquote><p class="cite"> - <a href="http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/02/04/welcoming-facebook-to-the-openid-foundation/">Chris Messina</a></p> </div>

2009-01-16T12:16:03Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Jan/16/aargh/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/want-proof-open.html">Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down</a>. “It’s easier for blogs, which don’t need a lot of demographic information about a user, to let people jump in and start participating socially without filling out a registration form.” Aargh. Repeat after me: supporting OpenID does not mean you can’t require additional registration details through a signup form.</p> </div>

2009-01-08T14:53:40Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Jan/8/wetpaint/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.wetpaintcentral.com/page/OpenID?t=anon">Wetpaint no longer supports OpenID</a>. I missed this, but they turned off their OpenID support in November due to low usage and high maintenance costs.</p> </div>

2009-01-05T10:46:57Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2009/Jan/5/talking/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://mywhat.org/2009/01/04/talking-about-openid/">Talking about OpenID</a>. “So a relying party walks in to a bar...”</p> </div>

2008-12-03T10:00:24Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Dec/3/openid/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/12/getting-openid-into-the-browse.html">Getting OpenID Into the Browser</a>. David Recordon makes the case for online identity management as a key browser feature (I like the “your browser is currently locked” concept), and argues that Gears is in a great position to deliver it.</p> </div>

2008-11-08T23:11:31Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Nov/8/clearing/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://blog.unto.net/miscellaneous/clearing-up-inaccuracies-about-the-google-openid-idp-launch/">Clearing up inaccuracies about the Google OpenID IDP launch</a>. Google took some undeserved flack when they launched their OpenID provider. For the record, whitelisting providers fits my definition of the “Open” in OpenID perfectly (providers and consumers are free to impose whatever policies they like).</p> </div>

2008-10-30T17:11:19Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Oct/30/apparentlymeuk/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/apparentlymart/18734.html">New OpenID Implementations Abound</a>. I’ve missed linking to a bunch of OpenID news recently—in particular, Google Accounts are becoming OpenID identifiers and LiveJournal has quietly ugraded its consumer support to OpenID 2.0.</p> </div>

2008-10-30T17:09:58Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Oct/30/jorgen/

<div class="quote segment"><blockquote cite="http://simonwillison.net/2008/Oct/27/windows/#c42074"><p>In the final Production release we will be adding the ability to sign in to the Live ID OpenID Provider using any of the credential types that can be used with regular Live ID sign-in’s -- including CardSpace, SmartCard, eID, etc.</p></blockquote><p class="cite"> - <a href="http://simonwillison.net/2008/Oct/27/windows/#c42074">Jorgen Thelin</a></p> </div>

2008-10-27T21:34:22Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Oct/27/windows/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/27/windows-live-adds-support-for-openid-calls-it-de-facto-login-standard/">Windows Live Adds Support For OpenID</a>. I hope they include the option to log in to the provider using CardSpace, to address phishing.</p> </div>

2008-10-14T16:59:12Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Oct/14/yahoo/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2008/10/open_id_research.html">Yahoo! Releases OpenID Research</a>. Extremely valuable research, conducted with a group of typical Yahoo! users. OpenIDs usability remains bad, and if we don’t get it right soon something centralised like Facebook Connect will take over and the Web will stop being open.</p> </div>

2008-09-22T20:56:33Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Sep/22/usability/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/oauthgoog/UXFedLogin">Google’s Usability Research on Federated Login</a>. Fascinating—suggests an approach to federated auth based on the Amazon.com “Yes, I have a password” login flow. Feels convoluted to me but apparently it tests really well against a mainstream audience. The more research shared around this stuff the better.</p> </div>

2008-08-29T10:01:32Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Aug/29/captcha/

<div class="quote segment"><blockquote cite="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/28/internet.captcha"><p>New authentication schemes such as OpenID, or Microsoft’s CardSpace, may help as adoption increases. These systems make it possible to register for one site using credentials verified by another. Instead of having many sites with poor verification procedures, the internet could have a few sites with strong verification procedures, that are then used by others. The advantage for the user is that they no longer have to jump through multiple hoops for each new site they encounter.</p></blockquote><p class="cite"> - <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/28/internet.captcha">Tim Anderson (in the Guardian)</a></p> </div>

2008-07-29T23:59:14Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Jul/29/oscon/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.railsenvy.com/2008/7/29/oscon-videos">OSCON in 37 minutes</a>. 45 OSCON talks summarised by their presenters in just 37 minutes, compiled by Gregg Pollack. I get to rant about OpenID for a minute at 27:22.</p> </div>

2008-07-22T19:30:53Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Jul/22/email/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://blog.vidoop.com/archives/139">Email Address to URL Transformation (EAUT) specification now available!</a>. Allows OpenID users to login using their E-mail address, which is converted in to an OpenID URL based on rules specified in an XRDS document attached to the root domain. Seems like a good idea to me.</p> </div>

2008-07-21T19:42:13Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Jul/21/myspace/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/21/myspace-to-join-openid-bringing-total-enabled-accounts-to-over-a-half-billion/">MySpace To Join OpenID, Bringing Total Enabled Accounts to Over A Half Billion</a>. Another 200 million OpenIDs—but the important difference between this and the Yahoo! and AOL announcements is that MySpace users know what their profile URL is. Whenever people have told me OpenID is flawed because people don’t understand URLs I’ve answered “sure they don’t, but they know their MySpace page”.</p> </div>

2008-06-28T23:46:11Zhttp://simonwillison.net/2008/Jun/28/refactor/

<div class="blogmark segment"><p><a href="http://refactormycode.com/">RefactorMyCode.com</a>. Neat community for discussing improvements to code snippets. Login using OpenID.</p> </div>