Microsoft and Google announce OpenID support
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:
December 4th, 2008 at 4:43 am
[...] dream of a single sign on across all your internet services is one step closer to reality as Microsoft and Google announce OpenID support. OpenID has been creating a growing buzz in the Blogosphere recently as the big players start to [...]
December 9th, 2008 at 9:48 am
[...] Google en openid Geplaatst op december 9, 2008 door twistedmind Al eerder heb ik al veel geschreven over OpenId. Google ondersteunde lange tijd nog geen openid. Sinds twee maanden kun je echter wel via je google-account inloggen op sites die openid ondersteunen! Rond 30 oktober kwam er een persbericht uit, zie ondermeer Webwereld en Nu.nl en tot slot OpenId.net. [...]
January 17th, 2009 at 7:58 am
[...] read the recent news articles from the BBC and others, both Microsoft and Google are joining the single sign on bandwagon, making their users’ id’s OpenID compatible. Both parties will now join the [...]
January 29th, 2009 at 10:55 am
When we can sign on to Yahoo with a Google OpenID and vice-versa, then we’re really making some progress.