Posts Tagged ‘adoption’
Posted at 2:58 pm on February 11, 2011 by Amanda Richardson
by Don Thibeau
I was a close reader of the commentary from Scott Gilbertson of Wired’s WebMonkey and some other posts of late. I appreciated the historical context the Forester Analysts provided; noting that when OpenID appeared on the scene, more robust solutions based on SAML under way in scenarios involving limited circles of trust — typically point-to-point enterprise scenarios — rather than consumer use cases.
History belongs to those that tell it, but I subscribe to the narratives that identity providers adopting OpenID opened the door for users to click on a button that identifies their preferred identity service for logging in at a relying-party site and are continuing to influence the development of new solutions and best practices for federated identity, trust frameworks and the like. It’s natural at this stage in its evolution that many are unpacking OpenID’s value proposition in light of the meteoric rise of Facebook Connect. Forester’s commentary “identifying the U.S. government’s support of OpenID as an important marker and noting OpenID Connect as an important way forward” and notes that “OpenID may well be that it was ahead of its time, but that hardly makes it a failure.”
The most recent blog reports of OpenID as deficient or dying assume an ever upward trajectory of adoption. The real world is different. My rear view mirror reflects an inevitable ebb and flow to any standard adoption process. While Facebook Connect’s adoption is phenomenal, it can overshadow the natural back and forth of standards development seen in recent experience in both OAuth and OpenID. All this is to say the OpenID Foundation’s role in driving a broader understanding of and improvements to the product is a critical success factor. The OIDF’s AB/Connect Working Group’s work can be pivotal in addressing the newer use-cases posed by users like Facebook and Government.
Certainly, international expansion is a key to that broader understanding and the product’s path forward. As a community we look to new leadership from Kick Willemse and Axel Nennker to bring a EU perspective to our work. We will be co-hosting our first OpenID Summit in Tokyo later this year. The Google team is considering the same for China. The 2011 OpenID Summits are both pacing items and forcing functions. Pairing OpenID Summits with other industry gatherings and collaborating with organizations like Kantara and the ITU mobilizes the resources of a global community and corporate participation. The leading by doing commitments of Google, Microsoft and Facebook and the example of PayPal’s hosting the upcoming OpenID Retail Summit gives us early positive indications of progress. Guessing the trajectory of any internet standard is both science and art. I tend to delete my responses to the ‘OpenID is a nightmare’, ‘fails to cure cancer’ commentary.
For my part, the question is not “What does OpenID mean?” It is rather, “How is OpenID influencing internet identity around you?”
Don Thibeau
Executive Director, OpenID Foundation
Tags: adoption
This entry was posted
on Friday, February 11th, 2011 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Foundation, Uncategorized.
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Posted at 8:35 am on March 9, 2010 by Nat Sakimura
The largest mobile operator in Japan, NTT docomo, which covers approximately 50% of Japanese population, started offering OpenID authentication on March 9.
Every docomo user has an identifier called i-modeID. Using this, users can single sign-on to mobile sites using docomo handsets, making one-click payment and other authenticated actions.
These kind of features fueled the great success of mobile commerce in Japan. However, this success has not been extended to the non-docomo handset world of the PC. For the PC, docomo offered a separate identifier called “docomo ID”. As it remained independent of “i-modeID”, it did not enjoy the same kind of popularity.
This situation was remedied today by linking the two different identity systems with OpenID.
As of today, a user can login to a site using “docomo ID” as an OpenID, then the site can obtain “i-mode ID” that is linked to the “docomo ID” transparently. It is expected that the payment on the PC sites through “i-mode payment service” would accelerate content sales through PC.
Some technical idiosyncrasies
NTT docomo published the docomoID Authentication Technical Specification on their web site. As an OP Identifier, one should specify “https://i.mydocomo.com/“. As a normal claimed identifier, one should specify “https://i.mydocomo.com/id/{user_unique_identifier}” where {user_unique_identifier}” is a random alpha-numeric string that is unique to the user-realm pair.
One peculiar feature of docomo’s implementation is that, to provide “i-mode ID” to the content providers, content providers should call a very simple GET API after they obtained the OpenID Assertion. The decision seems to have been made to avoid the transmission of i-mode ID through browsers, which may act as a man-in-the-middle attack point as users’ PC environment is not particularly safe. Using OAuth for this purpose seems to have been an option, but docomo seems to have decided that requiring it on top of OpenID to the content providers seemed to be a little too demanding. Thus, they devised this extremely simple API. Together with it, docomo also defined a kind of contact service API, which allows the content providers to send mail [*1] to the user’s mobile phone without sharing the mail address.
According to their official page, there are 55,692,500 docomo subscribers as of February, 2010. Japan’s population over 15 as of Feb. 1, 2010 is 110,470,000.
[*1] Currently, this “contact service” is currently limited to send a mobile site URL
Tags: adoption, japan, mobile, nttdocomo
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on Tuesday, March 9th, 2010 at 8:35 am and is filed under Case Studies, News.
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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 8:51 pm on January 15, 2009 by David Recordon
2008 was an awesome year for OpenID where the community created significant momentum moving toward mainstream adoption. No, not every site on the web is using OpenID nor does every consumer know what OpenID does, but last year alone the number of sites that accept OpenID for sign in more than tripled. Today, there are over thirty-thousand publicly accessible sites supporting OpenID for sign in and well over half a billion OpenID enabled accounts.
- AOL, Google, Microsoft, mixi (the largest social network in Japan) and Yahoo! have all shipped OpenID Provider implementations with nearly all of them supporting OpenID 2.0.
- In addition to many of the independent OpenID Providers already supporting the ability to exchange profile data, Google added the ability to do so in a limited fashion with AOL, mixi and Yahoo! have all introduced it in a limited beta fashion. This means that OpenID users signing into your site will easily be able to share information like their preferred username or email address if they wish to do so.
- A number of major sites added support to sign in using OpenID including AOL’s MapQuest, Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s Health Vault, SourceForge as well as the commenting services TypePad Connect and Intense Debate (which in turn enabled Barack Obama’s Change.gov). Google Friend Connect also enabled any site to support OpenID sign in via JavaScript which thousands of sites have done.
- Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! joined the board of the OpenID Foundation bringing additional insight, complementing the community board members and helping financially support the organization.
- A Japanese chapter of the OpenID Foundation was formed in February and has since added nearly forty-five member companies; including merchants, portals, educational institutions, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, airlines and banks.
- The BBC hosted twenty-six people from seventeen organizations in New York City to kick off an OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting facilitated by JanRain and the OpenID Foundation. Through the day specific questions by the content provider community (media companies and national affinity groups) were answered about OpenID and a discussion around how it could benefit the participants by supporting OpenID.
- The OpenID Foundation helped push forward usability and user experience research and best practices, by hosting an OpenID user experience summit led largely by Yahoo! and Google. The community plans to continue this work throughout 2009, with many individuals and companies participating.
- Projects aimed squarely at open source developers like the Pinax platform which is built atop Django or the DiSo project atop WordPress and Movable Type integrated OpenID support as a core feature, making it even easier to build new social websites with support for OpenID sign in. These of course join the likes of Ruby on Rails which already had an OpenID plugin used by sites like 37Signals.
- The OpenID Provider Authentication Policy Extension was approved as a finalized OpenID specification. It enables Relying Parties to request that the Provider employ specified authentication policies such as that the Provider employ a phishing-resistant authentication method.
- Multiple community driven projects looked at how OpenID usability and security could be improved by integrating OpenID with the web browser. Coming into 2008, VeriSign had launched their OpenID SeatBelt plugin and Sxip launched Sxipper for FireFox and Flock. In 2008, not only did VeriSign and Vidoop add one-click sign in functionality to their OpenID Providers, but Flock, MySpace and Vidoop collaboratively launched a new project called Identity in the Browser. I also wrote my thoughts on Getting OpenID Into the Browser, talking about why an identity enabled web browser really should be built.
- The first annual election of the OpenID Foundation’s community board members was held where one-hundred-and-seventy-five members voted resulting in the election of Brian Kissel, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Eric Sachs, Nat Sakimura, and Snorri Giorgetti.
Indeed, the launch of Facebook Connect – a completely proprietary identity system for the web – in 2008 underscores the importance of open standards-based technologies like OpenID. Certainly it provides clear motivation to the entire OpenID community to demonstrate the value of decentralization and interoperability with an additional emphasis on usability, security and consumer friendliness.
While Facebook Connect continues introducing consumers and companies to the idea of shared sign in and profile exchange, forward-looking social networks like MySpace are now building the same functionality atop OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial and other non-proprietary technologies. To their credit, Facebook continues to participate in an increasing number of meetups and events around OpenID.
Considering all that has been accomplished by the community since OpenID 1.0 first appeared on LiveJournal in 2005, in its short three-year history, OpenID has seen phenomenal adoption by individuals, the open source community, non-profits and companies. 2009 most certainly will see a continuation of that trend, especially as usability, consumer utility and pragmatic solutions become the focus.
Tags: 2008, adoption, community
This entry was posted
on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 8:51 pm and is filed under News.
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Posted at 11:20 pm on November 26, 2008 by David Recordon
As first reported by ReadWriteWeb, President-elect Obama’s website Change.gov now supports OpenID sign in for commenting on certain blog posts and sections of their site. Change.gov uses Intense Debate to power their comment who recently relaunched with OpenID support. As ReadWriteWeb wrote:
Every other major player that has announced support for OpenID has in fact only allowed accounts with their company to be used as an OpenID elsewhere – they have not allowed other OpenIDs to be used to log in to their own sites. That means Barack Obama is cooler than AOL, MySpace, Google and Yahoo!. Maybe you already knew that, though.
Intentional or not, it’s great to see OpenID continue to be built into tools used all over the web whether it be Open Source development frameworks, OS X Leopard, or hosted services like Intense Debate. Putting OpenID in front of such a mainstream audience will certainly continue pushing the community down the path of smoothing out OpenID’s user experience.
Tags: adoption
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on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 11:20 pm and is filed under News.
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Posted at 9:14 pm on November 25, 2008 by David Recordon
Last month at the first Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting in New York, several media companies and affinity groups identified two desired areas for improvement around OpenID: the user experience as it reaches mainstream adoption and the increased ability to exchange profile information given user consent. Since then, the OpenID Foundation, its members and the wider community have been working hard to understand what it will take to make OpenID more usable by mainstream users and why the larger OpenID Providers have not been quick to support OpenID Attribute Exchange.
As a quick aside, AOL has just launched My MapQuest which sports a great new OpenID login experience. It’s worth noting that in the process of signing up for a MapQuest account using OpenID, you’re also creating what seems to be an account at AOL too. Additionally, AOL requests profile information from your OpenID Provider meaning that in some cases you’re able to sign up for a new account without having to type your email address, name, nickname, etc. AOL is the first large internet company to support OpenID sign in on a non-blogging product and while they don’t yet let you use your OpenID to sign in on AOL.com, it’s seems clear that is the direction they’re headed.
From the user experience front, Yahoo! hosted the first OpenID User Experience Summit where nearly forty people came together sharing what they’ve learned around usability, user experience, and various interface designs for OpenID and OAuth. In the following weeks, more work has been underway focused on implementations that improve the intuitiveness of OpenID registration and login. At the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View the week before last, sessions were held around many different aspects of OpenID; technical, business and user experience, among others.
The general approach to improving user experience over the past year has been the idea of graphically representing various larger OpenID Providers. The main critique is that it will only scale to a fixed number of providers since not every logo can be displayed. That said, it represents the approach taken on an increasing number of OpenID enabled sites, by Facebook Connect, and is being productized by companies such as JanRain with their RPX interface.
As Google continues their usability research around federated login, they’ve built a login widget which allows the user to enter their email address and say that they don’t have a password but need help logging in. This then allows the site to see if they recognize the email address within their own login database or if it belongs to a domain such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com which also acts as an OpenID Provider. The ability to use an email addresses within OpenID is currently a highly discussed topic that is leading to the formation of a new technical working group to better understand the motivations and challenges, while also proposing a technology solution.
On the data side, Yahoo! has just announced a controlled beta of support for the Simple Registration extension (SREG) which provides full name, nickname, email address, gender, language, and timezone if the user chooses to share it. AOL has also just announced preview support for SREG profile information transfer of email, nickname, country, date of birth, gender, and postal code if the user chooses to share it. Additionally, Google’s OpenID Provider supports the transfer of a validated gmail.com email address via Attribute Exchange if the user chooses to share it. This trend of being able to more easily and securely exchange profile information via OpenID is one that we expect to increase through 2009.
Tags: adoption, attribute exchange, simple registration, usability, user experience
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, November 25th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under News.
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Posted at 10:20 am on October 21, 2008 by David Recordon
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.
Tags: adoption, design, research, usability, user experience
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under News.
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Posted at 12:15 am on May 1, 2008 by David Recordon
If you use open source software then you’ve probably heard about SourceForge before. If you develop open source software then you’ve probably even used some of their infrastructure in the past. Today they’ve made it even easier to login to SourceForge with OpenID. SourgeForge.net isn’t acting as an OpenID Provider but rather is accepting OpenID logins; this is a good thing and reinforces the trend of sites like Ma.gnolia only accepting OpenID logins.
In their announcement OpenID on SourceForge.net they say, “OpenID is getting tremendous traction and we’re happy to be jumping into it. it’s bringing us back in touch with fresh web (2.0) technology. as a decentralized open-source standard, it’s a perfect fit for us – it allows us to streamline more user interaction and participation with our site, and hopefully more for the whole OSS community.” As Steven Osborn points out, SourceForge.net is now one of the most prominent single sites that accepts OpenID to login. Steven also goes on to talk about some of the more advanced things SourceForge allows you to do with your OpenID if you do wish to use your profile URL as an OpenID too.
Congratulations SourceForge for continuing to help get OpenID in the hands of open source developers on a daily basis!
Tags: adoption, openid, relying party, sourceforge
This entry was posted
on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under News.
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