Big players are playing with OpenID
October 29th, 2008 | by kilps |Update: these two blog posts make it seem as if Google’s way of doing things are more legit than I thought - bit if that is the case then I have to wonder why there is so little information around about the changes to OpenID.
I don’t have much time for writing at the moment - but this is annoying me enough to make brief mention of it. Two weeks ago Yahoo became an OpenID provider. Today we hear that Google is doing something similar with Gmail accounts.
I’ll get to the main problem with the Google implementation just now - but the first glaring problem is that these two companies are still only providers and not relaying parties. I can’t use my Google OpenID to log into Yahoo services and the same vice versa - which defeats the point.
However there is one comment which does make a good point - that this helps to solve the chicken and egg problem. So sure we now have the egg (lots of OpenID providers) and smaller players now have incentive to become relaying parties - which is a good thing; but I just see little incentive for Google and Yahoo to become relaying parties in the future.
Then there is the problem with the Google way of doing things. The way I read this is that Google has gone and built its own way of doing things on top of OpenID - and kept the same name. I can’t go to any OpenID relaying party with my Gmail address right now and login - only websites which have implemented the Google API will work. This again defeats the point of a single login system - if every webmail provider works in the same way a developer is going to have to cater for each of them individually.
The only thing I can think of at this point is that Google is using non-standard technology - as I have read about plans to extend OpenID to email address and not just URLs. However quickly reading over everything makes it seem as if this is not the case - we’ve seen Google in the past make it clear when it is pioneering some new standard - and so I assume that we just have another case of grabbing some nice press.
