Yesterday JanRain, the company running the well-known OpenID Provider MyOpenID.com, published its Relying Party statistics. According to those statistics there were 31,185 unique websites by the end of 2008 which support OpenID as a Relying Party. As you can see from the chart below, adoption of OpenID is growing steadily. Of course, those are only JanRain’s figures but I think they are representative as MyOpenID.com is one of the bigger dedicated OpenID Providers and therefore is able to monitor most Relying Parties.

Some of the bigger new Relying Parties are video sharing site Dailymotion, AOL’s MapQuest and Universal Music’s subsidiary Interscope Records.

It’s interesting to see the different OpenID login screens of those three sites:

Dailymotion

The OpenID login screen is available by a link at the end of the usual registration form. It’s good to see that the benefits of OpenID are mentioned directly at the login screen. Also five different providers are mentioned if users don’t have an OpenID yet.

MapQuest

At MapQuest users have to decide first if they want to login with an AOL screen name or with an OpenID. Then the screen below is displayed where some better known (mostly) dedicated OpenID Providers are pre-selected. On Dailymotion mostly consumer brands are pre-selected:

Interscope Records

Interscope Records utilizes JanRain’s RPX service. RPX allows logins with OpenID, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, AOL and Google accounts. The login screen is directly available from the frontpage and mentions all supported login methods already via the respective logos. The login screen itself looks like this:

Three different Relying Parties, three different approaches to login screens. I think we will see more variations of login screens in 2009 as usability and user experience will become crucial for OpenID.

While adoption of OpenID is growing steadily, some people have still doubts about its security and usability. Not all of the concerns are unfounded and we highly encourage you to read about the technology, compare it to other existing login practices and make an independent decision if you want to use it. If you decide to try OpenID, make a list of what’s important to you and find an OpenID provider that fits your list best. We hope Spread OpenID can provide some assistance.

Fortunately the OpenID community is aware of most concerns and companies are constantly improving their products, websites, and even build new tools to make the OpenID experience more convenient and secure.

ID Selector

In April JanRain has launched ID Selector. ID Selector is a widget that relying parties can add to their existing login forms. It shows a list of some well-known OpenID providers. Users who wish to log in to the relying party don’t have to provide their full OpenID anymore; the username part of their OpenID is sufficient. ID Selecor takes care about the rest. That’s rather convenient as users don’t have to remember the URL pattern of their provider. Is it https://username.openidprovider.com/ or is it https://openidprovider.com/username? Providers listed in the widget can be customized by relying parties, so it might look slightly different on the various websites.

The example below is from OpenID login, please!

RecognitionAUTH

Unlike ID Selector RecognitionAUTH is not about usability but about security. It’s a an authentication method by ConfIDent Technologies which aims to make logins at OpenID providers more secure. Instead of typing in always the same password at provider logins, users have to remember some image categories they choose. Each time they login images are displayed in combination with a letter. People who use myVidoop as their OpenID provider know the technology already.
Besides image categories RecognitionAUTH also offers authentication by SMS, email, and voicemail. Currently ClaimID, Clickpass, and ooTao have also implemented it.

New Provider Added

Last week we also added a new provider to Spread OpenID – Beemba. Admittedly we have never heard about Beemba before but it looks quite interesting. It supports both OpenID 1.1 and 2.0 and also offers content aggregation from various web services.