[OpenID] Trying to verify that my OpenID is valid

[Peter Williams]

The openid directory has always been full of rubbish.

12 months ago, when I went through the same exercise, there were only 2 competent "business" sites: a dating site for Latinas (http://www.cupidvirtual.com/), and plaxo. The rest were someone's deployment of a wiki or blog, with some version of a plugin. Often, the URLs didn't resolve. If they worked, the value of the site was low."

About 9 months ago, the magnolia site came along and look mostly coherent (and almost useful). I also managed to be pretty competent talking to livejournal.

About 6 months ago, blogspot came along. It was confusing at first, because you had to be logged into the service natively before you could use a third party openid on its blogs.

Lately, some classy apps are coming out, including mapquest.com. This definitely looks useful!

Flikr would seem to be generally useful, but doesn't obviously support openid account linking.

I could list 10 almost-rans that look cool, but don't work well enough in their websso behavior to take the risk of customer support hits ..were we to introduce users to them.

I do think we are getting very much closer to business grade tho. Personally, though its not public, I count our own openid-enabled websso "gateway" as a destination, that gets desiring US Realtors to their gmail, calendaring and file sharing service hosted by Google Apps. Those three are definitely generic, "power" apps.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: general-bounces at openid.net [mailto:general-bounces at openid.net] On
> Behalf Of Dan Lyke
> Sent: Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:47 PM
> To: general at openid.net
> Subject: [OpenID] Trying to verify that my OpenID is valid
>
> So I decided to try to drag my OpenID identity back out of the dusty
> recesses. I have a MediaWiki server, so I made sure I had Evan
> Prodromou's most recent MediaWiki extension, and typed "openid test"
> into Google.
>
> First response is:
>
> http://openidenabled.com/resources/openid-test/
>
> which I try, entering http://www.flutterby.net/User:DanLyke, and I get
>
>    Failed to discover any OpenID service.
>
> Okay, wget my URL, look in the headers, sure enough there's a
>
>    <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location"
>    content="http://www.flutterby.net/Special:OpenIDXRDS/DanLyke" />
>
> Some further digging around reveals that, indeed, that document appears
> to be valid. So, strike "openidenabled.com" off my list of valid OpenID
> verifiers.
>
> Next  hit is a Google Code project, next one down is openidenabled.net,
> which says "Coming Soon".
>
> Third hit is
> http://winged.info/projects/news/plugins/openid/index.php?secret
>
> which gives me an internal parsing error.
>
> Okay, go to openid.com, find domain squatters, go to openid.net, and
> discover... oh, look, I can get an OpenID URL, but I still can't find a
> bloody OpenID consumer!
>
> I'm frustrated. When I last participated in the OpenID mailing list it
> was disintegrating into a whole bunch of features and technologies that
> I just didn't care about, but I figured leave it alone and let the dust
> settle and maybe something good would come out of it. Now I discover
> that bit-rot has set in and OpenID is either moribund or dead.
>
> What's happening here? And can I use OpenID yet, or is it still a
> far-off technology?
>
> Dan
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