This is a historic week for OpenID. Google and Microsoft announced the release of code to support OpenID 2.0 across their most important properties. On Monday, Microsoft, announced OpenID 2.0 support for their 460 million users on the LiveID platform. On Wednesday Google said it will be supporting OpenID 2.0 for any user that has a Google account. Both of these deployments are great news for the OpenID community and the Internet at large. It can be safely said that within the coming months, every single user on the Internet will have an OpenID.

There was some discussion from a few people yesterday claiming that Google’s implementation was a fork of OpenID. Today, Eric Sachs, Google’s lead on this effort, has another post responding to some of this early criticism:

That registration requirement also led to some confusion because users wanted to be able to use existing websites that accept OpenID 2.0 compliant logins by simply entering gmail.com (or in some cases their E-mail address) into the login boxes on those websites. … Once the XRDS file is live, end-users should be able to use the service by typing gmail.com in the OpenID field of any login box that supports OpenID 2.0, similar to how Yahoo users can type yahoo.com or their Yahoo E-mail address (In the meantime, if you feel really geeky, you can type https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id into an OpenID 2.0 login box).

Although these are both considered “preview releases” by both companies, the fact that they have put code out there that developers can start to work with is absolutely fantastic. Both Google and Microsoft have stated that these are testing implementations and as such, their may be certain limitations while they work on localization, scaling and general UI.

Mike Jones talks about some of the details of the Microsoft LiveID testing:

One feature of the OpenID 2.0 implementation that I’d like to call your attention to is that they give users a choice, on a per-relying party basis, whether to use a site-specific OpenID URL at the site for privacy reasons, or whether to use a public identifier for yourself – explicitly enabling correlation of your identity interactions on different sites.

We also have an episode of theSocialWeb.tv where we have Eric Sachs from Google talking about this historic week with David Recordon, Joseph Smarr and John McCrea:

The OpenID Provider Authentication Policy Extension (PAPE) Working Group recommends approval of PAPE Draft 7 as an OpenID Specification.  The draft is available at these locations:

http://openid.net/specs/openid-provider-authentication-policy-extension-1_0-07.html

http://openid.net/specs/openid-provider-authentication-policy-extension-1_0-07.txt

This note starts the 60 day public review period for the specification draft in accordance with the OpenID Foundation IPR policies and procedures.  This review period will end on Sunday, December 21st.  Unless issues are identified during the review that the working group believes must be addressed by revising the draft, this review period will be followed by a seven day voting period during which OpenID Foundation members will vote on whether to approve this draft as an OpenID Specification.

As background, the proposal to create the working group, which the membership approved, is available at http://openid.net/pipermail/specs/2008-May/002323.html.  The specifications council report on the creation of the working group is available at http://openid.net/pipermail/specs/2008-May/002326.html.

As OpenID continues to gain momentum, over the past few weeks both Google and Yahoo! have released the results of usability studies they’ve done around OpenID and digital identity systems in general. Google released their Usability Research on Federated Login looking at how to create user experiences that mainstream users can understand when using one account to login to other websites while Yahoo!’s OpenID Reasearch focused much more on how their own users are able (or not yet able) to understand what OpenID is and how they can use it. While at first glance this might seem troubling, instead it is actually one of the steps in the natural evolution of seeing a technology start to go from intriguing the early adopters to working on crossing the chasm to mainstream usage.

Yesterday at Yahoo!’s campus in California, nearly forty people from the OpenID community came together for a day to discuss the usability and user experience of OpenID and OAuth. Presentations were shared by Facebook about their experience developing Connect, MySpace explained how they’re combining OpenID and OAuth, Yahoo! around how they’re evolving their own OpenID Provider in response to their research, Magnolia shared how they’ve been using OpenID to help reduce spam, Google with their study on federated login user interfaces, and Plaxo wrapping up the day with how they’re looking at OpenID as a piece of a larger “open stack” for the Web. Lots of interesting presentations, analysis, and ways to move forward to help improve the usability of OpenID and OAuth came out of the day.

John McCrea has the play by play if you’re wanting to read more about what happened during the day, but I’m excited to see the sheer number of people and companies from various backgrounds (even those who compete with one another) collectively working to help improve OpenID and build a better Web.

A couple of weeks ago the BBC hosted twenty-six people from seventeen organizations including eight OpenID Providers and eight OpenID Relying Parties (sites which accept OpenID logins) in New York City to kick off an OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee. The goal of the session was to answer specific questions by the Content Provider community (media companies and national affinity groups) as well as to provide feedback to the OpenID Foundation, its member companies, and the wider community on the future direction of OpenID.

While OpenID has seen rapid adoption in the “user generated content” segment (blogs, discussion groups, wikis, etc.), we were very excited to see increased interest from mainstream media companies and affinity organizations. Participants at this event included AARP, AOL, BBC, Google, Hearst Magazines, JanRain, Meredith, MySpace, National 4-H, National Public Radio (NPR), The New York Times, Reed Business Information, Six Apart, Time Inc., Vidoop, and Yahoo!.

Throughout the day we covered a wide range of topics including:

• Business case for OpenID — use cases and economic impact
• Best practices for OpenID Providers and Relying Parties in the areas of user experience, data support, security, and product features
• Optimal Content Provider user experience
• Data Management — sources, integration, industry specific data, accuracy, security & trust
• Coming Enhancements — Provider Authentication Policy Extension (PAPE), OAuth, Portable Contacts API, MySpace Data Availability, and integration of OpenID into browsers.

Yahoo!, Google, and MySpace all presented information about their OpenID Provider services, thoughts on user experience and lessons learned, and some future plans. National 4-H presented a summary of an OpenID-based integrated National, State, and Local web platform that they will be deploying in the coming months. We shared a case study on Japan Airlines (JAL) federated partner commerce using OpenID with the proposed Trusted Data Exchange (TX) extension that Nomura Research Institute (NRI) has been developing. There was extensive discussion between existing and potential Relying Parties and the OpenID Providers about what would facilitate faster and broader adoption of OpenID in the Content Provider community. The session was moderated and feedback captured by Market Focus, a strategic marketing consulting firm who will be performing additional customer and market research on behalf of the OpenID Foundation.

If other content providers would like to join this advisory committee, please contact Johannes Ernst or Brian Kissel of the OpenID Foundation Customer Research Committee for further information.

Additionally, many members of the OpenID community will be attending the upcoming Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) on November 10-12 at the Computer History Museum in Mt. View, CA. This will provide a great venue for face to face discussions and additional opportunities to provide input and feedback on the future direction of OpenID.