It’s the age old problem… I have at least 50 user accounts on different web sites; del.icio.us, gmail, digg, etc… All of them with similar usernames and passwords. How nice would it be to have a single login that I can use to identify myself uniquely to any site or service. Enter the “new” OpenID standard and yet another great idea by the folks at SixApart. I know it sounds like microsoft passport but this is different because you can control every aspect of it, you can even run your own openid server.

With OpenID you’re user name becomes your website or blog url (if you have one). If you don’t have a blog or want one you can sign up with an openid provider.  So if you see a comment on your blog from “3.rdrail.net” you can be sure we added it. If you see comments by “3.rdrail.net.somespammer.com”, it should be obvious that we didn’t.

Again, our OpenID is 3.rdrail.net, if you goto our site and look in the head tag you’ll see the following:

<link rel="openid.server"
        href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
  <link rel="openid.delegate"
        href="http://tjake.myopenid.com/” />
  <meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location”
        content=”http://www.myopenid.com/xrds?username=tjake.myopenid.com” />

This redirects a OpenID enabled service to my OpenID provider.

So if I use a openid enabled service, I enter my domain which proxies to my openid provider. Once I login to my OpenID provider and an openid persona (registration details) are sent along to that service.

This is under my control, I can deny services from accessing my persona, change my OpenID provider at anytime or run my own OpenID service. Thats why it rocks. It’s simple for newbies but experts have complete control over their own service.

You can be sure that our next project will include OpenID integration (We’ll try to add it to junkdepot.com too!)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 7:21 pm and is filed under standards, web service, openid. 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.