OpenID - a new standard for website logins
Most of us probably have lots of user accounts on various websites, complete with their own specific usernames, passwords, and other information. Over time, all of these different user accounts can become difficult to keep track of.
This is where OpenID steps in. OpenID is a system designed to give you just one username and password that you can use on any website (once enough websites support it). It can also make registering for new user accounts faster and easier.
Here’s how it works:
The first thing you do is sign up for an OpenID account from an OpenID provider. A lot of sites provide free OpenID accounts. MyOpenID is a popular one. The sign-up process is quick, simple, and familiar.
The OpenID provider will give you something called an “OpenID URL”. This is a web address that you will use for your username on OpenID-supporting sites. For example, my OpenID URL is dhammond.myopenid.com
Let’s say you want to sign up for an account on a website that supports OpenID. Take a look at http://jyte.com/auth/login as an example. In the login form, you will see an OpenID identity field, which looks like a regular username field but with the standard orange OpenID logo. In that field, you write your OpenID URL and click the “sign in” button.
When you click the button, you will be taken to your OpenID provider’s website where you fill in your password. You will then be returned to the site you came from (jyte.com in this example) and the site will complete the registration.
Basically, what this all does is establish a trusted connection between the site and the OpenID provider so you can keep your account details in one place — the OpenID provider. Once you have your initial OpenID account, you don’t have to worry about your username being taken on other sites because your OpenID URL is truly universally unique. And you know that your login password is the same for all of these sites because it’s only stored in one place. In fact, the various OpenID-supporting sites never even have to know your OpenID password; they instead get a separate difficult-to-crack “key” from the OpenID provider that is handled in the background.
OpenID has really taken off lately, with many big-name sites and products rushing to offer support for it.
- Firefox 3 will have OpenID management built into the browser.
- Microsoft is working on adding native support for OpenID in Windows itself.
- AOL and Yahoo! are developing OpenID identity providers similar to myopenid.com.
- OpenID logins are currently supported by ImageShack, Ma.gnolia, Technorati, Wikitravel, LiveJournal.com, blogs using the Movable Type blog system, and other sites. (See this list of OpenID-supporting sites for more.)
- Wikipedia and digg.com are among high-traffic sites that have announced plans to support OpenID logins in the near future.
The OpenID standards are published under very liberal no-cost licenses. The owners of the rights to OpenID have stated, “Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.”
More information is available from the following links:
Although it is significantly more difficult for a website to be written to support OpenID than traditional login systems, there is currently a lot of development work on library packages to manage this. I can see OpenID becoming very popular within the next couple of years if it can get enough early adopting websites.
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