MySpace is certainly one of the most popular social networks worldwide. So it is really exciting to see the company adopting OpenID. Yes, MySpace is an OpenID Provider since this week. It announced possible support for the technology last summer already, but didn’t implement it until this week.
The OpenID support is part of MySpaceID, a strategy of the company to become more open, letting members log in to other sites with their MySpace login credentials and have their friends and activities from MySpace on those sites as well. If you’re familiar with Facebook Connect product, you’ll get the picture.
As you have probably guessed already, MySpace is only an OpenID Provider now, not a Relying Party that accepts other OpenIDs. That’s kind of sad but on the other hand, MySpace users are familiar with the concept of a URL representing themselves. It’s not some strange and mysterious thing to them. So this might drive OpenID adoption even more.
However if you intend using your MySpace OpenID you should keep in mind a thing or two:
- MySpace only supports the OpenID 2.0 specification. So you won’t be able to log in to sites that haven’t upgraded yet.
- As far as I can see, MySpace doesn’t support the Simple Registration extension (see the Technical Terms for more information about it), so you have to fill forms manually on new sites.
- I have tested it with various Relying Parties and was unable to log in to all of them. Some Relying Parties didn’t recognized it as an OpenID.
I am not sure who’s responsible for the latter problem, MySpace or the Relying Party, but it will hopefully be resolved. Until then try your MySpace OpenID and see if it works for you.
Posted in Provider.
Tagged with myspace, Provider.
By Carsten Pötter
– March 22, 2009
One of the really great features of OpenID is delegation. Delegation allows users to use their blog or any other URL they control as an OpenID without becoming an OpenID Provider themselves. They only need to add some HTML to the <Head> section of their blog or website. Cameron King has already provided some examples in his OpenID Guide for End Users. The benefits of delegation are obvious:
- Using a URL people know and are using often anyway.
- Switching the OpenID Provider without associating a new OpenID to existing accounts.
In order to use delegation users have to know some details of their OpenID Provider like the openid.server entry. Usually, this information can be found in the help sections of the providers’ websites. Though sometimes the information is difficult to find. Luckily there is an easy way to find the information now.
Delegatid offers a comfortable way for users to use delegation. You only have to enter your OpenID and Delegatid will generate the required HTML code.
Copy and paste the part between line 4 and 8 to the <Head> section of your blog or website and you’re done.
Posted in Users.
Tagged with Delegatid, Delegation.
By Carsten Pötter
– February 25, 2009
Only one week after PayPal joined the board of the OpenID Foundation as a sustaining corporate member, Facebook followed suit yesterday. It is the first social network to become a board member.
By joining the board Facebook hopes
that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web.
While it is excting to see a popular brand like Facebook joining the board of the OpenID Foundation, it has not made any announcement if it will implement OpenID in any way. So if you hoped to login to the social network with your OpenID already, you will be disappointed. Though it would be awesome if it was possible someday, of course. In the meantime Facebook’s experiences with Facebook Connect and user experience could help OpenID become more user friendly. It seems this is what the OpenID Foundation is hoping for as well:
Given the popularity and positive user experience of Facebook Connect, we look forward to Facebook working within the community to improve OpenID’s usability and reach.
Anyway, we definitely hope Facebook’s contribution to OpenID will further its success.
Posted in News.
Tagged with board, Facebook, membership, OIDF.
By Carsten Pötter
– February 6, 2009
Today the OpenID Foundation announced that PayPal joined the board of the OpenID Foundation as the sixth sustaining corporate member. This is certainly a very remarkable addition to the board as PayPal is a well-established brand all over the world and represents an industry that is not part of the board yet and which deals with very critical data, i.e. personal and financial data. So the addition of PayPal might be a signal for other companies and industries to try and implement OpenID.
However it is still unknown if and how PayPal will implement or support OpenID. There is no press release by the company so far, at least none that I am aware of. Will it become an OpenID Provider or a Reyling Party? Or maybe both? I’d like to see PayPal becoming a Relying Party which makes use of the recently finalized and approved Provider Authentication Policy Extension. I think this could be a real test for the extension and it forced more providers to push their security efforts. Though currently, this is just speculation.
Posted in News.
Tagged with board, membership, openid foundation, paypal.
By Carsten Pötter
– January 28, 2009
Sometimes OpenID and discussions about it seem so serious, sometimes academic, and sometimes even stupid. Where is the fun? A more casual app for playing around with? Well, if you like beer, it exists: 97 Bottles.
97 Bottles is only dealing with beer. Users can write reviews about their favourite beers, connect with their friends, and even learn more about beer along the way. But what’s so interesting about 97 Bottles that we feature it here, you might ask? Well, 97 Bottles is a relying party, so new users can simply log in to it with their OpenID and create a new account. Users can also create an acocunt by logging in with a username and password. But why should people do that when having an OpenID?
After logging in users can associate the OpenID with an exisiting account or create a new one. It is really good practice that relying parties allow users to associate an OpenID to an existing account later on. Unfortunately, some services don’t do this which is rather frustrating.
As you can see I don’t need to enter my email address and username anymore because 97 Bottles asked for it during authentication and got that data from my OpenID Provider. Of course, the site also features user profiles and unfortunately, the user experience could be better here. Below are screenshots from the profile form:
Most of those form fields could be filled with data from my OpenID Provider (via the Simple Registration extension, or see our Technical Terms). I don’t know why 97 Bottles doesn’t make use of that data. It’s really unnecessary to ask for it.
Though apart from full support for the Simple Registration extension, 97 Bottles is a nice little site which is a lot of fun. Also for the more tech-savvy users, 97 Bottles supports the hCard microformat – hReview would be nice as well, though, but it’s still in beta, so that might change – and makes it easy to find people’s Twitter friends.
Check it out if you like beer!
Posted in Relying Parties.
Tagged with 97bottles, beer, hCard, relying party.
By Carsten Pötter
– January 24, 2009
