Geekblok

I’ve ranted about OpenID before and in my predictions for 2008, I even wrote that OpenID will get supported more and more.

Today, Yahoo! announced that their OpenID implementation (as a provider) has opened up as a public beta. This means that you can use your Flickr photo URL (or custom me.yahoo.com URL) to log in to a lot of places. This will most likely boost the OpenID implementations (for now you can offer your service to (theoretically) all the Yahoo!/Flickr users).

Let’s see if my OpenID prediction becomes reality. As for the measurement, I’ll use The OpenID Directory. Currently, they have listed 471 websites.

Will Google and Microsoft follow soon with OpenID?

You may have heard about OpenID before, or maybe seen the little icon popup at some sites already. Fact is that OpenID is slowly but steadily gaining popularity. And in my humble opinion, that’s a Good Thing™.

Let’s first look at what OpenID really is. It’s a system that allows you to authenticate yourself. Instead of your email address (which is commonly used), OpenID uses an URI as point of view.

How many accounts do you have online? 5? 10? 25? 100? 250? more? A lot of people (including me) don’t even know the amount of accounts anymore. It looks like every other website requires you to login and after a while you just loose track of all accounts, passwords and email addresses used. OpenID is very useful for this! It allows you to have one login, one password and all you need to remember is your own website’s address.

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