Hex's Notebook

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May 12, 2008

Drive-by OpenID advocacy

Of late I've been noticing movement in the OpenID world, with more and more sites beginning to take part. Unfortunately, more often than not, this has entailed sites setting themselves up to provide identities, but not accept them (as well critiqued by Chris Messina a few months back).

As the contented owner of an OpenID identity, I've come to appreciate the facility of being able to log into multiple websites with a single username and password. Who wouldn't? The legacy model of having multiple user names across different sites - am I hex, downlode, earlemartin, or earle? - to remember, and worse still, multiple passwords*, is looking increasingly outdated and confusing. Sites that don't give you any option but to enter your details (and often way too many details at that), and then not letting you transfer any of that data out, are disparagingly becoming known as identity silos.

An identity silo has been defined (interestingly, by the Information Commissioner's Office of the British Government) as:

An identity that is used to represent an individual in that person's dealings with a particular application and is not integrated with other identities that the person has.

So I decided the other day to make the rounds of some projects that I use on a regular basis, and ask them what they think about OpenID.

First up was LiveJournal. LiveJournal is where OpenID began, and an early first place to allow OpenID logins in some form. However, it is still impossible to link an OpenID identity with a LiveJournal account. In this post to the lj_dev community I ask what's happening. Official response comes there none; and some interesting replies point to much earlier (two years earlier, in fact) discussions in which, allegedly, promises were made to go further (and volunteer patches received) but nothing was done. Conclusion: LiveJournal no longer cares.

Next I stopped by the Wikimedia Foundation's wikitech-l mailing list for MediaWiki developers. The situation there appears to be that once they've concluded their work on unified login for all Wikimedia projects - which is close; as an admin on Wikipedia I've beta-tested it and it seems good - they can look into it. Which is great.

A query to FriendFeed's newsgroup got an enthusiastic user response, but nothing from the developers. The same for this thread in the Ohloh programming site's forums.

Asking the del.icio.us mailing list got no response at all.

Get Satisfaction are working on it (they already have OAuth support, which is good). Brightkite will "probably" do it, but they don't have a timescale for implementing it yet. Twitter have yet to reply a month after someone asked them in this GS thread.

I also asked the wiki-standards mailing list, which is comprised of wiki engine software authors, if they were looking to implementing support, and got a generally positive response.

So that's what I did. You can help out, by asking the people whose software you use if they're planning to implement support. Be sure also to stop by OpenID, please! and vote for your favorite applications.

*Or even worse than that, having a standard password for web stuff (come on, most people do) that varies in some small way across sites due to local restrictions on possible passwords. Ugh.

Posted by hex at 6:04 PM in: Brightkite, FriendFeed, MediaWiki, OpenID, Twitter, identity

Posted by: Robert Mark White at May 27, 2008 8:12 AM

Posted by: Earle Martin at June 11, 2008 6:28 PM