Goodbye!

Image by Mac Babs

We were close to announce this once but this time it is final: Spread OpenID will not be updated anymore.

Maybe you wonder about the reasons. Well, when Thomas and I first talked about Spread OpenID back in the summer of 2007, OpenID was – compared to these days – still in rather early development. But both of us were enthusiastic about OpenID already, especially about its promise to provide users with an opportunity to build an online identity independent of any company. However, at that time it was mainly driven by developers and therefore rather technical. There were hardly any resources available for users who wanted to know more about it or tried to choose an OpenID provider.

Spread OpenID should have been such a resource and we had many ideas about the site. Ha, there is even a mindmap somewhere on the net about it. You won’t believe the ideas we had. Hopefully, no one will ever find that map. Anyway, by the time we eventually launched Spread OpenID, the OpenID Foundation also re-launched its website, made it more user friendly, and included some of the ideas we had for Spread OpenID. So in the end we launched with a small provider comparison and a blog accompanying it.

However the blog is also document that things didn’t work out the way we originally thought. We updated it rather infrequently and didn’t add much more resources to the site. The reasons were manifold but the main one was simply time. Both Thomas’ projects and my own blog suffered (and still do) as well. Maybe we were a little bit naive about it. I don’t know.

The inevitable happened, Spread OpenID was on hiatus for a few months in 2008 and we tried to find someone else who was able to continue it with more commitment and enthusiasm. But this failed as well. So we tried to revive it again at the beginning of last year. But this was also just short-lived.

In the end, not only time is still missing but priorities regarding OpenID also changed for us. It’s just not as important to us anymore as it used to be two years ago. We still like it and we are happy about the progress that was made over the last two years. Though honestly, there are also developments we don’t like, e.g. there’s hardly any space for independent providers anymore.

The site will continue to be up for some time. It probably depends on traffic for how long, though. The OpenID Foundation is working on a provider matrix currently, if we got things right. So there will be some kind of replacement for the provider comparison.

To cut a long story short, we say goodbye today. Thanks a lot to all people and blogs that supported and linked to us, most notably Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web and Chris Messina. Also huge thanks to Cameron King for writing a great article on OpenID and contributing it to Spread OpenID, and last but not least to all readers. Without you we would have stopped much earlier.

Thomas & Carsten