Maybe there is hope after all. First Steve Jobs calls for an end to DRM. Next, Microsoft formally supports OpenID. Peace, love, and understanding reign. Or something like that.
I’ve been watching OpenID for some time now. A few months back, I implemented OpenID server support on the Jobster authentication service. I could act as an OpenID authority using a Jobster user and password. It was a labs project and isn’t in production yet but Microsoft jumping on board makes it that much more interesting.
There is lots of confusion about what OpenID is and is not. First, OpenID is about online identity. It is a way for you to make a claim to your identity and have that respected around the web. It is only as trustworthy as the authority is. Further degrees of trust and validation can be built on top of it. Getting identity assertion into a standardized form is a start. It offers single sign-on but allows the user to pick who the single sign-on authority is. I think there are people that dream of being their own authority but the trust issue will reduce the usefulness of that solution.
The other shoe to drop will be when one of the other huge user repositories (Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com) also signs up. Microsoft with its enormous collection of Hotmail/Passport users coupled with potential OpenID server support for Active Directory means that the standard could become very pervasive. So far, OpenID has mostly been blog comment logins and Web 2.0 sites. It is worth noting that Verisign was among the four partners mentioned. They are no small player themselves.
Microsoft’s announcement has certainly added more importance to my labs project. I’m hopefully that in the near future, Jobster will both accept OpenID logins and serve as an OpenID authority.
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