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.

Just three days have passed since the last post, but sooner than we have thought here is another one.

We have added Xlogon to the provider list. While we don’t want to recommend any providers listed here, we are actually quite happy about this addition. Xlogon is a German OpenID provider, so you can guess we have watched its development rather carefully since the launch in Spring of last year.

If you want to test this provider, keep in mind that (including Terms of Service) are in German which might be a problem if you don’t know the language. Update: See Boris’ (Xlogon) comment for more information on an English version of the website.

Some good news regarding OpenID have been reported the last two days. Two major media and internet brands have adopted OpenID.

Yahoo! Becomes an OpenID Provider

If you are reading tech blogs regularly you have read the news somewhere else already: Yahoo! will become an OpenID provider by the end of the month. This is really good news as almost 250 million users with a Yahoo! account will have an OpenID then. Yahoo! simply turns its IDs – the current login to Yahoo! – into OpenIDs.

We don’t know the exact details of the OpenID implementation yet, though a few things are known already:

• OpenIDs will be very short: yahoo.com
• Flickr – a Yahoo! property – will also work as an OpenID: flickr.com
• Only OpenID 2.0 will be suppported
• Yahoo! won’t accept logins with other OpenIDs (yet)
• Some phishing-prevention features are built in

I am sure we will have a closer look at Yahoo! once OpenID support is live. Maybe we can gather enough information to add Yahoo! to the Provider Comparison page (any Yahoo! developers reading here?).

By the way, what will happen to Simon Willison’s idproxy.net project which is using Yahoo! IDs as OpenIDs already?

Login to CNN Political Market with an OpenID

It is possible to log in to CNN’s Political Market with an OpenID now. Unfortunately users have to sign up for an account first and then associate an OpenID with it. Admittedly, this could be done a lot easier. I tested it yesterday and it works great, though. Maybe this is a first step of OpenID adoption at CNN.

[via David Recordon]