[OpenID] Finally, light at the end of the tunnel, for OpenID

[Santosh Rajan]

In the last few days two new pieces of information come as great news for
OpenID. One for the long term, and the other for the short term.

Mozilla Firefox's demonstration of a single sign on with OpenID is testimony
to the fact that Browsers will eventually manage the users identity. It may
take five years or more to happen.

What is interesting for OpenID is that Browsers will not support proprietary
"Connect's". Unless of course the Connect vendor also happens to own the
Browser. I am hearing of Twitter Connect and Google Connect. The only
"Connect" that will be common to all browsers will be OpenID! I think
vendors coming out with their own Connect's, are venturing into something
really futile.

The short term good news for OpenID is the webfinger protocol being
developed. This will allow for email discovery, paving the way for emails as
OpenID's. 

The onus on discovery lies with the email provider which is only natural,
and that is the only way it can work. This won't work if non email providers
were OP's. Atleast not as equals to the email providers. Non email providers
can issue virtual email addresses if they like. But it is not the real thing
and they will have to dish out the real email address via SREG or AX.

If Facebook had supported OpenID as an OP with SREG support earlier, me as
an OpenID community member would have been hard pressed to support the
webfinger protocol. Another way out would have been the centralized
discovery mechanism which is not going to happen anytime soon, and Facebook
would have been the de facto centralized mechanism until then!

To really make OpenID happen I always believed we need one of the biggies.
Ebay or Amazon or someone like that, and these guys won't play without an
email address. With the webfinger protocol for email addresses they will
definitely come on board. So it becomes very important for the community to
move the webfinger protocol fast.

We can now look forward to great times with OpenID!



-----

Santosh Rajan
http://santrajan.blogspot.com http://santrajan.blogspot.com 
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Finally%2C-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel%2C-for-OpenID-tp23449844p23449844.html
Sent from the OpenID - General mailing list archive at Nabble.com.