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Posted at 10:51 am on September 25, 2009 by Allen Tom
Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace have launched support for the OpenID OAuth Hybrid Protocol, which combines OpenID authentication (sign in) with OAuth authorization (access control) into a single interface. Websites that accept OpenID can now let the hundreds of millions of users who already have either a MySpace, Google, or Yahoo! account sign in and enable two-way data sharing of their profile, contacts, and activities, without having to register a new site-specific account or to share their password.
Plaxo is one of the earliest adopters of OpenID, allowing their users to sign into Plaxo using an OpenID enabled account with just a couple mouse clicks. Instead of requiring first-time Plaxo users to manually verify their email address by sending a verification email, Plaxo uses OpenID Attribute Exchange to verify Yahoo! and GMail email addresses without forcing users to wait at their mailbox for the verification email to arrive. Building on their successful experience with OpenID, Plaxo is experimenting with the Hybrid Protocol: A portion of new users who sign up for Plaxo using either a GMail or Yahoo account can now sign into Plaxo with their OpenID and authorize two-way data sharing of their Contacts and Activities via the Hybrid Protocol. You can read more about how this works on the Plaxo blog.
“OpenID+OAuth hybrid onboarding is the state-of-the-art for connecting users and sites across the emerging Social Web,” says Joseph Smarr, CTO of Plaxo and Board Member of the OpenID Foundation. “Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace all have massive userbases and expertise in consumer-friendly design, along with a rich set of APIs. So this is a major milestone in making the Social Web more open and interoperable.”
Another trailblazer in the OpenID space is JanRain, whose RPX service powers the l
ogin and registration flows for their customers, including Qype and MySears. Using the OpenID protocol, users can sign into RPX-enabled websites with an account that they already have. Now that RPX supports the Hybrid Protocol, sites integrating with RPX can now let users sign in with one of their existing accounts and share their Profile. In addition, these sites can also receive massive referral traffic by syndicating their user activities back to their OpenID Provider to be viewed by their friends and contacts at Yahoo!, Google, or MySpace.
Not only are we making OpenID more powerful, we’ve been taking steps to make OpenID easier and less confusing to use. The traditional OpenID “redirect” user experience has been criticized for taking a user away from the site during the login process. The OpenID User Interface Working Group has been chartered to make OpenID more user friendly, and we’re glad to announce that Yahoo!, Google, and MySpace now support the Popup UI as defined in the OpenID User Interface Extension. Sites that want to preserve their context and keep the user on their site can open a small popup window to complete the OpenID authentication flow. In order to help prevent phishing, the User Interface extension requires that the popup be displayed in an independent browser window with the address bar clearly displayed.
OpenID gives users control over their data and makes it possible for sites to build a single interface that can reach virtually all potential users. Because OpenID is an interoperable open standard, sites that accept OpenID can reuse the same interface and code to accept identities from a wide variety of OpenID Providers, including Google, AOL, MySpace, and Yahoo!. This makes it possible for virtually anyone to sign in to a site using an account that they already have.
It’s been an exciting month for OpenID, with recent news about our involvement in the Open Government Initiative, and now with support for Hybrid and the Popup UI. Stay tuned for more exciting news as we continue to improve OpenID!
P.S. If you’d like to meet the folks working on OpenID, OAuth, and the Open Stack, please join us at the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View, CA this November.
Allen Tom
Architect, Yahoo! Membership
OIDF Community Board Member
Tags: oauth, user experience
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Posted at 4:11 am on September 9, 2009 by Chris Messina
Chris Messina is a community board member of the OpenID Foundation, long time advocate for citizens of the web, and prolific blogger on all things “open”.
Today in collaboration with Vivek Kundra, the nation’s first CIO, we are announcing a pilot program intended to enable individual citizens to login to government websites with their existing accounts — without revealing their password or personally identifying information — using OpenID and InfoCard technologies.
This is an important step in the Obama administration’s commitment to open, transparent, and participatory government.
First, it acknowledges and embraces existing, open technologies, rather than inventing their own (or worse, hiring independent contractors to do the same).
Second, this comes at a critical time in the history of OpenID, of which there are now well over 500 million OpenID-capable accounts in the wild, (even if few people realize that they already have one!). Given the wide deployment of this technology, it only makes sense that the government should leverage this wide potential userbase to facilitate interaction with its citizens.
Third, it is critical for the government and government agencies to develop solutions and adopt technologies that make it easier for modern citizens to engage with them, to exist competently alongside other social networking websites.
In other words, by embracing OpenID (and InfoCard), the government is helping to further establish the value of owning one’s own identity, and of having convenient, consistent, and privacy-protecting mechanisms in place to enhance and enable participation.
To make this more real, consider booking a campground on a state park’s website: do you really want to create yet another account (that you’ll probably never use again) just to reserve a campsite? Probably not.
To make this more personal: imagine searching the National Institute of Health’s website for information for a loved one who was recently diagnosed with cancer. You’d want the technology to get out of the way and serve your goals — who’d want to register for a new account when you just want to save your search progress (say, from a library kiosk) and resume it later (i.e. from home)?
It’s cases like this that begin to tease at the value of using existing accounts for low-security government interactions (at least to start). Like email, I expect to see this start with a slow, gradual adoption, and overtime, gain momentum and relevance.
To find out more about this pilot program, read the full press release and visit our OpenID for Government page.
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Posted at 4:10 am on by Don Thibeau
Gov 2.0 Conference - Washington, D.C. — September 9, 2009 — Ten industry leaders — Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems — announced today they will support the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government — government that is transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This open identity initiative is a key step in President Obama’s memorandum to make it easy for individuals to register and participate in government websites — without having to create new usernames and passwords. Additionally, members of the public will be able to fully control how much or how little personal information they share with the government at all times.
These companies will act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies. The pilot programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are being certified under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and reviewed by the federal government.
“We are pleased with the caliber of organizations who have signed on to be active participants in this initiative,” said Judy Spencer, Co-Chair of the Federal Identity, Credential, and Access Management Steering Committee (ICAM). “They represent some of the best thinking and innovation in the private sector. We also value the ongoing support and guidance of the OpenID Foundation and the Information Card Foundation in facilitating digital identity for open government.”
Since President Obama’s open government memorandum earlier this year, federal agencies have been embracing Web 2.0 technologies to interact with members of the public via means such as blogs, surveys, social networks, and video casts. Today’s announcement paves the way for individuals to use these new services and customize their experience on government websites without needing to reveal any personally identifiable information – including passwords. It also takes advantage of best practices from the private sector for protecting privacy and security, including making it easier for citizens to have pseudonymous interactions with government sites when desired
In essence, this initiative will help transform government websites from basic “brochureware” into interactive resources, saving individuals time and increasing their direct involvement in governmental decision making. OpenID and Information Card technologies make such interactive access simple and safe. For example, in the coming months the NIH intends to use OpenID and Information Cards to support a number of services including customized library searches, access to training resources, registration for conferences, and use of medical research wikis, all with strong privacy protections.
Dr. Jack Jones, NIH CIO and Acting Director, CIT, notes, “As a world leader in science and research, NIH is pleased to participate in this next step for promoting collaboration among Assurance Level 1 applications. Initially, the NIH Single Sign-on service will accept credentials as part of an “Open For Testing” phase, with full production expected within the next several weeks. At that time, OpenID credentials will join those currently in use from InCommon, the higher education identity management federation, as external credentials trusted by NIH.”
In digital identity systems, certification programs that enable a site — such as a government agency — to trust the identity, security, and privacy assurances from an identity provider are called trust frameworks. The OIDF and ICF have worked closely with the federal government to meet the security, privacy, and reliability requirements set forth by the ICAM Trust Framework Adoption Process (TFAP), published on the IDManagement.gov website. By adopting OpenID and Information Card technologies, government agencies can cost effectively serve their constituencies in a more personalized and user friendly way.
“It’s good to see government taking a leadership role in moving identity technology forward. It’s also good to see government working with experts from private sector and especially with the Information Card Foundation and the OpenID Foundation because identity is not a technical phenomenon — it’s a social phenomenon. And technological support for identity requires the participation of a broad community and of representatives of government who define the legal framework within which identity will operate,” said Bob Blakley, Vice President and Research Director, Identity and Privacy Strategies, Burton Group. “Today’s announcement supplies the most important missing ingredient of the open identity infrastructure, mainly the trust framework. Without a trust framework it’s impossible to know whether a received identity is reliable.”
Under the OIDF and ICF’s open trust frameworks, any organization that meets the technical and operational requirements of the framework will be able to apply for certification as an identity provider (IdP). These IdPs can then supply authentication credentials on behalf of their users. For some activities these credentials will enable the user to be completely anonymous; for others they may require personal information such as name, email address, age, gender, and so on. Open trust frameworks enable citizens to choose the identity technology, identity provider, and credential with which they are most comfortable, while enabling government websites to accept and trust these credentials. This approach leads to better innovation and lower costs for both government and citizens.
“Open government cannot and will not compromise either security or privacy,” said Drummond Reed, Executive Director of the Information Card Foundation. “By working with private industry, the U.S. government is harnessing the innovation and efficiencies of the open market and letting citizens choose their preferred means of engaging with government agencies.”
“This is a significant leap in participatory democracy,” said Don Thibeau, executive director of the OpenID Foundation. “Following President Obama’s directive, our government has worked with market leading companies to leverage modern, open standards to engage with its citizens. When the government adopts open identity standards and trust frameworks, the result is better service, more transparency, and greater accountability.”
· · ·
Industry Leaders Weigh in on the Open Identity for Open Government Initiative
“The joint work between the US Government, OpenID Foundation, and Information Card Foundation to enable the use of commercial identities on government web sites is groundbreaking,” said Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s Chief Identity Architect. “These pilot projects will provide invaluable insights about how these systems are actually used in practice, enabling people to build upon this seminal work both for government and private sector sites, further extending the reach of interoperable Internet identity.”
“Information Cards and OpenID technologies have the potential to improve consumer experiences online tremendously,” said Michael Barrett, Chief Information Security Officer for PayPal. “As an identity provider, we believe that this technology has enormous potential to improve the safety of Internet commerce.”
“The ability to enable individualized interaction through tools and technologies that citizens use every day represents a tremendous opportunity for federal agencies with citizen-facing missions,” said Lloyd Howell, Sr. Vice President of Booz Allen Hamilton. “Because this Trust Framework can be applied with a common experience across all federal websites, every agency can take advantage of this approach to improve operational effectiveness and reduce costs.”
“Equifax brings unmatched expertise in identity management and verification to the open trust framework initiative,” said Ron Carpinella, vice president of Identity Management, Equifax. “The opportunity to deliver our proven technology and its privacy features to the government sector is truly exciting. This pilot program is the catalyst that will enable better, more secure, and user-centric capabilities in government and industry digital services.”
“Open standards like OpenID create a better Internet for everyone. As the largest single provider of OpenID accounts, Yahoo! is eager to pave the way for further OpenID adoption. That is why Yahoo! has led the effort to make OpenID easy to use and understand for consumers around the world. And by meeting the government’s standards for security and reliability, we believe OpenID will continue to be the most convenient and trustworthy open identity standard on the Web.” said Allen Tom, Membership Architect, Yahoo!.
“VeriSign is excited to be a part of the U.S. Government’s initiative to further President Obama’s call for a more open and participatory government,” said Nicolas Popp, vice president of Innovation at VeriSign. “Based on our experience with bringing trust to the Internet, we look forward to playing a role in the development of an identity trust framework that will enable citizens to communicate with the government openly with confidence.”
“AOL has always focused on helping consumers get safe and easy access to the content and services they want online. That’s why we’re proud to be part of the government’s pilot program to allow citizens to access government websites using identities they already own. As an early supporter of OpenID, we recognize the tremendous value this service can offer consumers and applaud the government for its vision,” says George Fletcher, Chief Architect for Identity Services at AOL.
“As a champion of consumer privacy and a long-time provider of identity management, we at Acxiom are privileged to provide identity technologies to this effort,” said Tim Christin, senior vice president of Acxiom’s Identity Solutions group. “U.S. citizens can now be assured an easier and safer Internet experience with the government. ”
“It’s exciting to see the United States government embracing innovative web-based technologies to serve its citizens in a more convenient, secure, and personalized way,” said Brian Kissel, CEO of JanRain and Chairman of the OpenID Foundation. “This further validates the broad range of applications and market segments where OpenID is having a positive impact on users’ web experiences.”
“The open identity initiative illustrates how identity technologies have moved beyond theory to solve real-world challenges and highlights the potential for opportunities in the private, as well as the public sector,” noted Jeff Carter, CEO of Azigo. “Hosted Information Cards let web sites issue Information Cards quickly and easily — a key step forward for the future of digital identities.”
“Open Government represents a significant step forward in modernizing our nation’s democratic system.” said Patrick Harding, CTO of Ping Identity and ICF board member. “We are thrilled to be involved in establishing the Internet identity security and privacy standards necessary to ensuring the long term success of using 2.0 innovations to improve governmental transparency and encourage citizen involvement.”
“Citi is a huge proponent of driving alignment within the public sector to collaborate in the development of accepted standards that promote interoperability for common processes.” says Hilary L. Ward, Director, Identity Business Manger, Citi. “We are excited to be a part of this initiative and being able to bring our innovation and expertise to this program. This is a tremendous first step in creating a broader identity and trust framework that can work across applications, communities and borders to the benefit of citizens everywhere.”
“Privo is pleased to be an identity provider under the open trust frameworks to support access by any citizen who desires to interact with participating government sites, while still protecting their identity,” said Denise Tayloe, Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of Privo. “We see tremendous parallels between the work we do with children and parents to verify and protect their identities using our existing, and available, Identity Card technology and the work the government is doing to interact with its citizens in a safe online environment.”
“Opening the U.S. government to direct citizen involvement using OpenID and Information Card identities is a major step for the trust fabric of the Internet”, said Steven Sprague, President and CEO, Wave Systems Corp. “Wave is innovating ways for both these technologies to take advantage of trusted computing infrastructure so OpenID and Information Card users can enjoy unparalleled access and interaction with government websites with maximum security and privacy.”
“Interoperable and trusted identities are foundations to building a smarter planet that includes the systems that run, the way we live and work as a society. In order to build such a smarter planet, it is important for governments, communities and industries to work together in building a smarter planet.” said Nataraj Nagaratnam, IBM’s Chief Identity Architect. “This initiative around pilot projects that bring these three groups together is a significant milestone in the journey of identity metasystem, and in the evolution of open, interoperable identities”
“The US Government taking real steps to adopt open technologies has the potential to enhance and simplify citizen engagement,” said Chris Messina, an advocate of open technologies and CEO of Citizen Agency, LLC. “This effort sets in motion a shift in how individuals can interact with the public sector and makes progress on the Obama administration’s promise for a more open, transparent, and participatory government.”
“Information Card technology and OpenID specifications have co-evolved at the Internet Identity Workshop since 2005. The launch of this open trust framework is an exciting major development in the evolution of an open identity layer for the Web,” said Kaliya Hamlin of Identitywoman.net and co-producer and facilitator of the Internet Identity Workshop.
“The synchronicity between the U.S. and Japanese government is quite interesting,” said Nat Sakimura, Senior Researcher at Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. “The Japanese government is going forward with DigitalCivil Life Project that also embraces open identity systems and trust frameworks. We believe they are showing the changing tide towards more open and citizen centric government throughout the world. Today’s announcement by the U.S. government is an important step towards it.”
Media Contact:
Liz O’Donnell
617-365-7172
Liz3point0@aol.com
Tags: gov 2.0, gov20s, open identity
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Posted at 9:00 am on August 13, 2009 by Chris Messina
Announce availability of joint white paper: “Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government“
Washington, D.C.—August 13, 2009–The OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) announced today they have published a white paper outlining their approach to open trust frameworks for certification under the U.S. General Services Administration’s Trust Framework Adoption Process (TFAP). Open trust frameworks provide a way for citizens to easily and safely engage with government websites: a key step in making open government a reality.
“Open trust frameworks are the way to bridge open identity technologies like OpenID and Information Cards with the trust requirements of large communities such as the U.S. Federal Government,” said Drummond Reed, executive director of the Information Card Foundation. “They are a practical solution to enabling government agency websites and applications to accept identities from non-governmental identity providers. This reduces friction and lowers costs while at the same time increases security and privacy.”
“The fact of the matter is you can’t have open government with broad citizen engagement without trust frameworks and open standards,” adds Don Thibeau, executive director of the OpenID Foundation. “OpenID and Information Cards offer an open standards approach for achieving this via the Internet and other public networks.”
The paper, “Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government” and coauthored by Thibeau and Reed, is available for download at the OpenID Foundation and The Information Card Foundation websites. More information on U.S. General Services Administration’s Trust Framework Adoption Process is available on the government’s IDManagement.gov website.
-more-
About the OpenID Foundation
OpenID Foundation (OIDF) is a non-profit open source community whose mission is to drive the broad adoption of OpenID technology. The Foundation fosters and promotes the development and adoption of OpenID as a framework for user-centric identity on the Internet. OpenID allows users to sign in to multiple websites without needing to create new passwords. OIDF is headquartered in San Ramon, Calif. www.openid.net
About the Information Card Foundation
The Information Card Foundation is an international non-profit whose mission is to advance simpler, more secure, and more portable digital identity on the Internet. Information Card technology gives users greater control over personal information while at the same time enabling more beneficial digital relationships with businesses. Steering members of the foundation include Deustche Telecom, Equifax, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, and PayPal. ICF is headquartered in Boston, MA. Visit the ICF website at www.informationcard.net.
Tags: Don Thibeau, drummond reed, government, information card foundation
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Posted at 1:15 pm on August 10, 2009 by Chris Messina
This is an interview framed by Chris Messina, an OpenID board member and elected community representative with Don Thibeau, Executive Director of the OpenID Foundation.
So, how have your first months with the foundation been?
Fast paced—I am amazed at the level of activity, complexity of issues and the volume of opinions. The Foundation is evolving rapidly from within; the range of membership interest is increasing. While from the outside; the diversity of adoption and adopters is exploding. It’s a wild ride.
OpenID is surfing huge wave of mainstream interest in social media, in open government and in industry positioning for open web realities. I’ve kept a low profile for three reasons. One: there are much better evangelists in the community than me; two: I’ve been tending to legal, financial, “plumbing” issues. We needed to fix the “foundation of the foundation” to respond to legitimate demands from the community for more services and better tools at the same time as giving member companies the accountability they require. Lastly, the CIO of the government called the OpenID board to a meeting in Washington to ask for our help with the President’s “Open Government” initiative. It was a memorable meeting for two reasons; it took place at the White House Conference Center and I’ve never seen OpenID Foundation board members wearing suits and ties.
What kind of unexpected challenges and opportunities have you encountered?
I knew I had a cool job when a friend mentioned NASA was using OpenID to task satellites. Like many agencies, NASA Goddard has been experimenting with the use of various open standards (Geospatial and others) including OpenID and Information Cards. We are also hearing from state, local and foreign governments about their desire to use OpenID. Maybe because I live in DC, I see the OIDF participation in government standards or “sausage making” as common sense. GSA, NIST and other government forums are exactly where collaboration is expected and beneficial to OpenID. All the while, I’ve been playing catch-up to make the Foundation run smoother. I live in Washington D.C. and work with Board members on the East and West coasts, in Bangalore and Tokyo. These challenges come with the territory. So, I am long on opportunities and short on time.
How do you feel about the progress you and the rest of the board have made in the past months?
One clear consensus view is we want more done sooner. It’s a good problem. It reflects the dynamism of today’s identity ecosystem and the pressure we all feel to the have Foundation matter on issues we care about. For good reasons and bad, all too often the Foundation operated at a suboptimal level. Now we are working to improve the quality of membership services, specification processes and web tools. The engine of the OIDF remains its working groups and committees. We live and die by the level of community participation and the quality of Board leadership.
While there are boards with members with fancier titles, the OpenID Board is made up of people responsible for getting things done in their companies and among their peers. This Board is still new; a mash up of companies, personalities and passions. My job is to be an honest broker of ideas and build an environment so we can stay focused on a protocol specific agenda and add value in this rapidly evolving identity ecosystem.
Let’s get in to some specifics: you mentioned that one of your top three priorities was to “build a foundation for growth” by making sure that the “Foundations’ finances and governance issues are solid”. Can you elaborate on specific steps that you’ve taken so far and what kind of progress you’ve made?
First, we’ve outsourced all non-essential functions like accounting, administration, etc. to companies that do that for a living for other open standards groups. This gives member companies the accountability they require to contribute financially and the community the confidence they need to contribute expertise. Second, we’ve put our money where our mouth is. The budget invested scarce resources in only those plans that protect IP, promotes adoption and evolves OpenID. As Raj Mata, our treasurer said; “We will not have a “feed the beast” budget.” The Board agreed to fund only those things a Foundation like ours can and must do.
The investment in “plumbing” will result in easier “on ramps” for individual members and corporate sponsors. Memberships will be processed faster, budgeting standardized. Better tools for committees and working groups are some of our success metrics. I need to demonstrate the OIDF’s capacity to provide thought leadership and tangible participation benefits. Chris Messina is leading a volunteer effort with Michael Olson (of JanRain) and “Content Wrangler Extraordinaire” Amanda Richardson to update our web workplace and community participation.
Now let’s cover some specific areas of emphasis for OpenID. What can you tell us about the progress with improving OpenID’s usability?
This is a key concern throughout the community. We have to do better. We are planning a series of usability events in the fall. These will focus on usability in government adoption as well as in new areas of adoption. We are planning open use case workshops with the National Institutes of Health, the National Library of Medicine and the National Cancer Institute to refine interoperability and look at usability through the eyes of scientists collaborating worldwide. Luke Shepard of Facebook and Alan Tom of Yahoo, our usability committee co-chairs, are looking at several options in the Bay Area to bring new energy and approaches to OpenID usability. Google has long standing and deep domain expertise in usability and our efforts can now include new players like Sears and Kmart. I know the developers in “My-Sears” usability labs in Chicago are looking forward to meeting their peers in the Bay Area and throughout the community.
OpenID’s growth has been exponential, but its adoption has been asymmetrical. Usability is the key to a more balanced evolution. We need more relying parties involved in this adoption dynamic than we’ve seen to date. But as with security, I believe the more platforms are built where OpenID can be used, the more value gets created. It will be fascinating to see how this “network effect” plays out.
What’s new with OpenID, security and privacy?
With the growing mainstream interest in OpenID comes good and bad. We are open to misunderstanding from non-technical audiences and increased scrutiny by privacy advocates and interest groups. I think OpenID can benefit from the mainstream media’s excited embrace of social web tools and therefore be enriched by mainstream adoption. I am a fan of Facebook’s Tim Sparapani, a former civil liberties attorney. He is one of the most articulate voices in the community on privacy. In many ways, privacy has become a commodity. Travelers exchange it for safety; celebrities exchange it for well, celebrity, and we all exchange it for a few cents off at the checkout aisle in the Safeway. We know that the social web is, by definition, interactive, that it takes information about what I’m typing in order to send things to me.
Privacy is an issue. It is not a crisis. The industry has done the right thing by getting ahead of this curve and saying, we have to be able to be part of a coordinated effort to address the public and address people in Washington DC, especially those interested in “open government.” One of the principles the Board wants to embed is a self-regulatory, self-certifying system. We’re committing to collaborating with the entire identity ecosystem in order to educate the public continuously about both benefits and risk mitigation.
Security is another issue the Board has invested in. The government interest in OpenID forces a deep dive into these issues. I am reminded daily about OpenID’s security challenges. I welcome the worries. It’s understandable given the denial of service attacks we’ve seen recently. My response is an invitation to join the effort to shape our standard. OpenID is a new protocol it is undergoing a rigorous real time shakedown. Andrew Nash, a board member of both the OpenID and Information Card Foundations, put together a team at PayPal to help OpenID get traction in of our toughest challenges. That’s the kind of leadership that will help get traction on one of the Foundation’s highest priorities.
Lastly, what should we be looking forward to over the next three to four months?
Some call government adoption the “mother of all use cases.” We been collaborating with ICF and other groups on a theme we call “Open Trust Frameworks for Open Government.” Our working hypothesis is the US Government’s pilot adoption of OpenID protocols is a “forcing function” and will yield benefits throughout the open identity community. As a forcing function, the government’s technical “profile” for OpenID and accompanying certification requirements (Trust Framework Adoption Program) are, in effect, use case constraints. I believe the size, influence and market value of a government wide adoption offers timely, material and strategic benefits to member companies and the community at large. OpenID OPs who want to participate in adoption of OpenID “are forced” ( no one forces Google to do anything…) to complete a set of tasks based on the GSA’s limited, paired down set of technology features, certification requirements and privacy controls.
The OpenID Foundation and other identity protocol organizations have invested significant resources in this public/private collaboration. These industry leading groups have clear expectations of significant positive returns in several areas. Vivek Kundra, US CIO told the OIDF that the government intends to leverage the large and growing OpenID installed base and corporate sponsorship to further its open government goals. So the OIDF believes this forcing function will further its mission by accelerating adoption and improving and streamlining how government agencies, contractors and citizens use OpenID.
But only time will tell, this public/private industry initiative will be successful if the current collaboration expands to meet the increased challenges of the next phase: a public-facing launch of our open trust framework and pilot programs at the NIH and other agencies.
Tags: Don Thibeau, government, interview
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Posted at 1:01 pm on by Chris Messina
As the US government considers OpenID as a vehicle for citizen engagement, it became time for the OpenID Foundation’s website to receive similar consideration. For some time, the site has been neglected and ignored — serving primarily as a resource for developers, with little regard paid to people just learning about digital identity. The new design — while far from complete or final — is a first step to remedy that imbalance.
Moreover, I think it’s also important to realize that in Don’s post today (and related interview), we’re starting to witness the slow realization of the importance and relevance of digital identity to a broader audience — one that has become accustomed to having fractured identities across the web, and having to create new logins on every website with which they wish to engage.
The new design is intended to be more open and clean — and to present a fresher face for OpenID — indeed, to provide the foundation for a re-invigorated identity.
As I mentioned, the site is far from complete — and will need a lot of work to become the public resource that it needs to be in order to continue to make OpenID — both concept and technology — more accessible to an increasingly wider swath of the internet population.
If you have feedback or ideas, please don’t hesitate to post them or send them to the marketing mailing list.
Credit where credit’s due: This project came together in a very short amount of time, and I’d like to give a shoutout to the team at Cloud Four (Jason, Lyza, Megan, John and Aileen), Amanda Richardson, John Ehrig from Global Inventures, Michael Olson and Brian Kissel from Janrain and Don Thibeau — who contributed to help make this happen. Of course the work’s just begun, but this is an important first step forward for the Foundation.
Tags: branding, redesign, website
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Posted at 8:16 am on July 2, 2009 by Brian Kissel
Yesterday, Sears Holding Company (SHC) announced it has adopted OpenID technology, enabling website visitors to easily register and login at the MySears and MyKmart communities using existing accounts at Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, and Yahoo!. This is exciting news for for online retailers and follows shortly after the OpenID Foundation hosted the first Retail Advisory Summit this past April in New York.
MySears and MyKmart community sites are online destinations that give consumers a variety of ways to share in-depth information about products, helping make their purchase decisions easier. Visitors to these websites have the opportunity to write product reviews, post comments on the reviews of others, participate in discussion boards and post ideas for the community to vote on. Customers also have access to special offers and coupons in return for their participation in the community.
Read what Sears and Viewpoints (a technology partner) had to say in their press releases:
“We’re constantly looking for ways to stay innovative in our online initiatives by identifying and implementing technologies that help our users navigate our communities with ease,” says Rob Harles, Sears’ vice president of community. “Our adoption of the OpenID technology helps simplify our customers’ online experience and ultimately helps us meet our goal of ensuring our customers have the most efficient shopping experience possible.”
“As the social web becomes a bigger part of our everyday interactions and the boundaries separating the myriad of social networks blur, portable online identities will become critically important,” commented Matt Moog, Founder and CEO of Viewpoints Networks, a SHC technology platform partner.
By building on top of OpenID and related technologies, Viewpoints allows its clients’ websites to offer a more intuitive and customized user experience that uses existing profile data a consumer brings to their site from various OpenID Providers. Viewpoints and Sears have taken advantage of much of the ongoing user experience and usability work that is one of the two main focuses of the OpenID Foundation this year. Viewpoint and JanRain continue to show that by implementing OpenID in an innovative manner, companies such as Sears will increase registration and login rates while also enabling instant engagement with the consumer.
Sears and Kmart’s adoption of OpenID demonstrates its fundamental business value; it makes things easier for web users. In this case, OpenID makes the online shopping experience richer and simpler for customers. While much has been made of the impact of the social web, the action taken today by Sears and Kmart shows how relevant OpenID is becoming to mainstream retailers. This adoption is another example of the groundswell of interest found across a wide spectrum of today’s online user experiences.
This announcement represents a major step forward in OpenID adoption by a top ten retailer outside of the technology industry. Deployments like these continue to build on the ongoing usability and user profile management work being championed and facilitated by the OpenID Foundation and its membership. Sears and Kmart have provided a great example of how OpenID can dramatically facilitate quicker, easier, and richer online engagement.
Tags: adoption, relying party, usability
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on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 8:16 am and is filed under News.
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Posted at 6:07 pm on May 14, 2009 by David Recordon
This morning, Google released an upgrade to their OpenID Provider to support the draft OpenID User Interface Extension along with JanRain who added support for it to their Relying Party service RPX. This means that Google users signing into sites like UserVoice (choose “Google” to see it in action) now have a much better user experience; one much closer to that of Facebook Connect. Google also allows users to choose to share their profile information with Relying Parties via OpenID Attribute Exchange and the Google Data APIs via OAuth.
The OpenID User Interface Extension is one of the main pieces of work that has come from the OpenID Design Summit hosted by Facebook earlier this year. The extension replaces the traditional OpenID sign in flow of being redirected from the Relying Party to the OpenID Provider with a popup window which shows the URL bar on top of the Relying Party itself.
The Google Code Blog writes about their implementation in more detail:
The new popup style UI, which implements the OpenID User Interface Extension Specification, is designed to streamline the federated login experience for users. Specifically, it’s designed to ensure that the context of the Relying Party website is always available and visible, even in the extreme case where a confused user closes the Google approval window. JanRain, a provider of OpenID solutions, is an early adopter of the new API, and already offers it as part of their RPX product. As demonstrated by UserVoice using JanRain’s RPX, the initial step on the sign-in page of the Relying Party website is identical to that of the “full page” version, and does not require any changes in the Relying Party UI.
Once the user selects to sign in using his or her Google Account, the Google approval page is displayed. However, it does not replace the Relying Party’s page in the main browser window. Instead it is displayed as a popup window on top of it. We have updated our Open Source project to include a complete Relying Party example, providing code for both the back-end (in Java) and front-end (javascript) components.
Once the user approves the request, the popup page closes, and the user is signed in to the Relying Party website.
User experience continues to be one of our key priorities for the community and foundation this year, and progress like seeing Google and JanRain ship the first implementation of the OpenID popup flow is demonstrating that we’ve been able to seize the momentum coming into this year and make real progress in a short period of time.
We’re looking forward to discussing this and other initiatives at the Internet Identity Workshop this coming Monday.
Tags: google, interface, janrain, popup, usability, user experience
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Posted at 7:27 pm on April 14, 2009 by Brian Kissel
The Retail Advisory Committee
Last week representatives from the OpenID Foundation (Google, JanRain, NRI and Yahoo!) led a discussion about third-party authentication and user-centric identity with representatives from several online retailers. Topics included:
- Business case for OpenID and third-party authentication
- Best practices for online retailers leveraging OpenID
- Leveraging rich user data from third party identity providers
- Feedback from online retailers to the OpenID Foundation and member companies.
Tatsuki Sakushima of NRI led a case study presentation on Japan Airlines’ use of OpenID and a custom extension they developed for federated identity with hotel and car rental agency partners. This work has led into the creation of the Contract Exchange Extension working group to develop a standardized extension for this use case.
- Japan Airlines saw a 100% increase in partner registrations as a result of the OpenID deployment.
- Further, Japan Airlines was able to deploy a federated identity solution with its business partners faster, more flexibly, and at lower cost than alternative approaches they had been considering.
Praveen Alavilli of Amazon enthusiastically endorsed the work of the Usability Committee: the User Interface Working Group proposal and first draft of the OpenID User Interface Extension.
Brian Kissel of JanRain reviewed several case studies summarizing the quantitative and qualitative benefits of OpenID and third-party authentication. Some examples include:
- Sulit.com.ph: 15% of new registrations are via OpenID, up from 10% a couple of months ago
- 37 Signals: 15% of logins are via OpenID on their Basecamp productivity application
- Mixx: UI improvement resulted in ten-fold increase in registrations via OpenID and third-party services. 20% increase in registrations from direct and referrer traffic.
- AFI (Rock band, event promotion): “We were blown away with the fan response. In two weeks we received 850 (YouTube video) submissions, had 12,500+ fans register on the website, 10,000+ comments, and over 100,000 votes to select our winners.”
- Get Satisfaction: Deployments for their customers — Twitter and Songbird — are seeing OpenID utilization of 20% or more
- Sourceforge.net: OpenID login has grown to about 10% of total logins
- Stackoverflow: Third-party registrations have grown from 10,000 to 50,000 users in a couple of months
The entire webinar presentation is on Slideshare and embedded below.
Improving the OpenID User Experience
Speaking of the Usability Committee, at the last OpenID Foundation Board meeting, an official committee was formed to help continue spearheading the community efforts. Allen Tom of Yahoo! and Luke Shepard of Facebook agreed to co-chair this important new committee. They’re looking for volunteers, so if you’re interested, make sure to get in touch with them. With Breno de Medeiros of Google, Tom is proposing an OpenID User Interface Extension. This an exciting continuation of the work started at the Content Provider Advisory Committee as well as the past User Experience Summits hosted at Yahoo! and Facebook.
So it’s been an exciting and productive time during the last few weeks. We encourage others to share their experiences, successes and challenges with the OpenID community via the mailing lists and our new UserVoice feedback site.
Tags: retail advisory committee, user experience
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Posted at 8:19 pm on April 7, 2009 by Guest Author
About two weeks ago, MySpace released an update to MySpaceID taking advantage of OpenID combined with OAuth to provide a sign in and profile sharing with a user-experience at parity with Facebook Connect. Max Engel is MySpace’s Product Lead for their Open Platform and took the time to write this post, providing some more details about how MySpaceID works.
At MySpace, we recently released several critical new feature enhancements to MySpaceID, a product under the MySpace Open Platform. We delivered OpenID support, an OpenID/OAuth Hybrid experience, and support for syndicating “Friend Updates” via the emerging Activity Streams specification.
These new components to the MySpace Open Platform allow us to not only provide developers with new tools to create distributed applications that are built on top of our social platform, but also to deliver an identity solution that builds on top of the “Open Stack” to provide flexible an extensible options that embrace open standards.
OpenID aligned perfectly with MySpaceID as an authentication technology. As a social portal, we already embraced the notion of representing identity with a URL. An overwhelming number of our users have setup vanity URL’s (i.e. myspace.com/pixelelated) and so we knew that OpenID would align well with our users. In addition, we wanted to make sure that we were working with the flow of the web, and we strongly believe that collaborating on open standards is critical to this mission.
As we worked on our OpenID solution for MySpaceID, we knew that we had to rollout the technology in a way that emphasized a lightweight and simple interface design and user experience. OpenID has wrongly been maligned by a stigma that the technology can’t be easy to use. Our aim was to break that label and demonstrate with our MySpaceID product that OpenID and usability aren’t conflicting terms. Luckily, there was a community ready and willing to help. The progress made at two OpenID Usability Summits helped us refine our implementation and allowed us to leverage the collective knowledge of other OP’s. This is the strength of open standards: the ability to work together to forge ahead and work together to solve a problem.
When working on the MySpaceID design, we embraced a pop-up window for login to help make the user experience even easier, and to help the integrating relying party offer a clean hand-off. We support both directed identity as well as standard URL-based discovery, and ultimately feel that by offering modular options to developers we are creating the most value for our users. In addition, by rolling out the OAuth Hybrid extension with this, we can allow our users to provision web service access to their MySpace profile, friends, content, and activities in the same step.
Beyond our new enhancements around single-sign on with OpenID, and the rollout of the Hybrid protocol, we are supporting the new Activity Streams specification. A core part of the DNA of MySpaceID is empowering the user to take their data with them. By offering API’s for sharing activities, we’re enabling our users to take their own activities and share them through aggregation and lifestreaming services. In addition, developers can provide a user with a window into their life on MySpace by incorporating the API in Dashboard-style widgets, such as our implementation with the new Yahoo! homepage. With activity sharing, we wanted to go beyond just offering the functionality and ensure that we were working with the community to implement something that could be standardized. We embraced this philosophy when collaborating on the Portable Contacts spec and worked to align it with OpenSocial, and so we were quite comfortable with this model of development.
I hope that we have shown that our choice for the technological piping which powers MySpaceID (OpenID, OAuth, Portable Contacts, OpenSocial, and Activity Streams) didn’t negatively impact the experience we could provide. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Our choice to embrace these open standards has given us a more powerful and flexible platform. We’re excited to prove that a MySpace user can visit any site that has integrated MySpaceID and go from a button click to bringing their identity with them, all while doing it in a way that has a clean user experience and puts the user in control of their privacy, security, and data. As an OpenID community, we’ve all worked to make tremendous progress over the past year, and I think we’re only beginning to realize the real potential to empower users through open standards for the social web.
Tags: usability, user experience
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“OpenID+OAuth hybrid onboarding is the state-of-the-art for connecting users and sites across the emerging Social Web,” says Joseph Smarr, CTO of Plaxo and Board Member of the OpenID Foundation. “Google, Yahoo!, and MySpace all have massive userbases and expertise in consumer-friendly design, along with a rich set of APIs. So this is a major milestone in making the Social Web more open and interoperable.”
Not only are we making OpenID more powerful, we’ve been taking steps to make OpenID easier and less confusing to use. The traditional OpenID “redirect” user experience has been criticized for taking a user away from the site during the login process. The OpenID User Interface Working Group has been chartered to make OpenID more user friendly, and we’re glad to announce that Yahoo!, Google, and MySpace now support the Popup UI as defined in the OpenID User Interface Extension. Sites that want to preserve their context and keep the user on their site can open a small popup window to complete the OpenID authentication flow. In order to help prevent phishing, the User Interface extension requires that the popup be displayed in an independent browser window with the address bar clearly displayed.
OpenID gives users control over their data and makes it possible for sites to build a single interface that can reach virtually all potential users. Because OpenID is an interoperable open standard, sites that accept OpenID can reuse the same interface and code to accept identities from a wide variety of OpenID Providers, including Google, AOL, MySpace, and Yahoo!. This makes it possible for virtually anyone to sign in to a site using an account that they already have.
