[OpenID] About Email Addresses and OpenID

[Santosh Rajan]

Full text of my Blogpost with same subject.

Out of the hundreds of millions of OpenID's in the wild today, 99% of them
are provided for by Yahoo, Google, MySpace and AOL.

Three of them are email providers and your OpenID is tied to your email
address. ie Opening and account at one of them gives you an email address
and an OpenID. You can also create a Google account with a non Google email
address. Again the OpenID is tied to an email address. So when you are
logging in with any of these OpenID's you are in effect logging in with an
email account.

This is also true in the case of MySpace even though it is not an email
provider. When you login with your MySpace ID you are really logging in with
your email address! The MySpace OpenID is also tied to your login email
address.

In other words 99% of the OpenID's in the wild are really email addresses
masquerading as OpenID's!

Why the need for this masquerading? Because OpenID does not support Email
addresses as OpenID's.

And why doesn't OpenID support Email addresses as OpenID's? Given the facts
above I cant think of a reason. Can you?


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Santosh Rajan
http://santrajan.blogspot.com http://santrajan.blogspot.com 
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