[OpenID] About Google, Yahoo, Facebook and OpenID

[Santosh Rajan]

Facebook's support for OpenID may have some worrying prospects for Google,
Yahoo, Microsoft  and other major email providers, who would like to be
OpenID providers.

Even though everyone says Facebook is now an OpenID RP, I dont agree with
that. What Facebook does is only grock the users browser login status, and
logs the user in if he has delegated that provider to Facebook. It does not
work in many cases and I am not impressed with their implementation, and
have said as much in my 
http://santrajan.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebook-support-for-openid-where.html
earlier posts .

So what is it that is going to be of a concern for Google, Yahoo etc?

Whether by design or by accident, what really Facebook has done, is to
become an OpenID discovery and delegation provider for all its users. ie.
Facebook users can now point to their Openid provider and also indicate
their prefered provider in case they have more than one. This is
significant. Because the primary problem to be solved for OpenID is
discovery and delegation, and Facebook does it for its users.

Now all Facebook has to do is "Switch On" OpenID for Facebook Connect and
Voila! You have 250 million users ready with single sign on with Facebook
Connect! Throw in 250 million verified email addresses for good measure. (I
am not sure all these are verified, but I can say they did verify mine).

If major RP's are not already salivating at the prospects, then they will
soon. And this is not really all that bad. If you don't mind Facebook being
your centralized mechanism for OpenID discovery and if they are the closest
you can get to one, then why not?

Now you know why Google, Yahoo etc need to be concerned. But there are other
options. One is the 
http://santrajan.blogspot.com/2009/05/case-for-openemailid.html OpenEmailID 
i have suggested in an earlier post, where the onus on discovery rests with
the RP. An even better Option is the  http://code.google.com/p/webfinger/
WebFinger protocol , where the onus on discovery lies with the email
provider for email addresses as identities.

Whatever happens I think it is high time Google, Yahoo etc move ahead with
providing discovery for their users. 

The OpenID community must come to a concrete decision on which way they must
go and go after their objective as fast as possible.



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