Relying Party Statistics Show Steady Growth of OpenID

January 3, 2009 – 7:38 pm

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.

JanRain Relying Party Stats

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.

Dailymotion OpenID login screen

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:

MapQuest OpenID login screen

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:

Interscope login screen

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.

By Carsten Poetter | Posted in News | Tagged dailymotion, interscope, , mapquest, , statistics | Comments (0)

New Community Board Members of the OpenID Foundation

January 1, 2009 – 9:10 pm

On December 24 the first election for OpenID Foundation community board members ended. It was the first time members of the OpenID Foundation could actually vote. Foundation members could nominate themselves and by the end of the nomination phase 17 people ran for seven community seats.

Elected for 2-year terms are Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, Chris Messina, and David Recordon. Elected for a 1-year term are Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton, and Brian Kissel. Congratulations to all of them! The community board members are taking office today. In addition to the community board members there are five corporate board members: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, VeriSign, and IBM.

While the majority of former community board members were nominated, it is interesting to note that only two of them were actually re-elected: David Recordon and Scott Kveton. I guess, that doesn’t necessarily mean the old board did a bad job but it certainly means that many Foundation members think it’s time to change a few things. In my opinion, a focus of the new board has to be on marketing. The OpenID Foundation has to illustrate the benefits of OpenID to both users and companies. There have to be more people who actually use their OpenID and there have to be more companies and services which offer logins with OpenID. The new board has good chances to accomplish this as it is more diverse now. It’s not only a North American board anymore but an international one - Snorri is French and Nat is Japanese - and people have a more diverse background, I think.

There is a lot of work ahead and I wish the new board good luck! If you want to support the work of the OpenID Foundation you can become a member. The membership fee has been reduced from $100/year to $25/year for individuals.

By Carsten Poetter | Posted in News | Tagged board, community, OIDF | Comments (0)

Happy New Year!

January 1, 2009 – 3:47 pm

happy new year
by Edie.P

Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had a great start into 2009 and wish you all the best for the rest of the year. May all your dreams and wishes become true.

And with the new year Spread OpenID is also back. As some of you probably remember - well, just have a look at the posting below - we were looking for a new editor for the site in July. We had some applications since then but either we thought the candidates were not really qualified enough or some didn’t get back in touch. So by the end of the year Thomas and I just had two options left: close the entire site or continue with both of us at the helm. In the end it was a rather easy decision to continue. First, it would be a pity if the information on the site was getting lost and second, OpenID and other open standards like OAuth and OpenSocial are definitely on the rise currently. So more people will look for information on OpenID. We hope to be a source for them.

We have also added a new provider to our provider comparison: Swiss clavid which offers a great number of security features and looks very promising.
Also we have created a Delicious account for Spread OpenID: http://delicious.com/SpreadOpenID We will add interesting and informative bookmarks regarding OpenID and related topics to that account. You can also access the bookmarks via the sidebar.

If you have any questions just get in touch with us. :)

By Carsten Poetter | Posted in Spread OpenID | Tagged clavid, relaunch | Comments (1)