What Is OpenID

Toby had sent me a link on how to make your own website your OpenID page but he has yet to write up his experience *hint* *hint*.

Whilst I have heard of OpenID I thought not to dabble in the technology yet because:

• Not a standard
• None of the services I use needed one yet

It was until Toby had sent me the link to the idea of having you website as your one true identity online where I thought it was time to look into it.

What Is OpenID

The idea behind OpenID was to have a decentralized one true identity on the Internet. This ID would be your key into any website. You would create an OpenID account which would ask you for your normal information like name, username, password, etc and then using a unique URI you can use it to sign into anything that has an account without re-registering your details.

Decentralized?

The idea of having a decentralized architecture is so that no one company, organization or body controls your OpenID. For example in order for you to get access to AOL Instant Messenger you will have to create an account with AOL and AOL only. With a decentralized approach no one body can say whether you are or are not that person. Of course to over come this issue it is better to have a trusted OpenID provider to verify your identity rather than authenticating your own OpenID. You have have one or more providers verify your identy and you can switch between as freely as you wish.

History

Brad Fitzpatrick, who created LiveJornal was the creator of the protocol in 2005 and is seen as the figure head of OpenID. OpenID is not the first protocol to come into existence to try and solve the multitude of identites and username and passwords users have to create and remember for each site.

OpenID gained wide adoption in 2007 with companies like Symantec, makers of the popular Norton Anti-Virus, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and in 2008 Yahoo! and SourceForge also implemented OpenID authentication.

Questions

One thing I’d like to know is what happens if your OpenID provider went offline? Would you still be able to log into sites? Whilst it’s highly unlikely but what if all of the providers you had went offline?

OpenID & Me

I plan to use OpenID and as usualy will document my experience on my website. Hopefully WordPress will integrate it into the WordPress engine but till they do so there are some plugins available. One of the drivers for implementing an OpenID is trying to tie my Facebook, Twitter and blog into one working “Danny Tsang” profile. Facebook is a good social networking site to stay in contact with people and also finding old friends. My blog because it’s like my online diary… I mean journal and Twitter because it is for micro blogging and allows you to follow others. A blog will contain the meat of the information but a micro blog will be short messages of what your doing to what you are thinking.
I need to do more research before I go ahead and start implementing OpenID.

OpenID official website
How to turn your blog in to an OpenID <-- Toby's link Wikipedia Entry on OpenID

About Danny

I.T software professional always studying and applying the knowledge gained and one way of doing this is to blog. Danny also has participates in a part time project called Energy@Home [http://code.google.com/p/energyathome/] for monitoring energy usage on a premise. Dedicated to I.T since studying pure Information Technology since the age of 16, Danny Tsang working in the field that he has aimed for since leaving school. View all posts by Danny → This entry was posted in Software. Bookmark the permalink.

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