OpenID for
Entrepreneurs
mashup*, 24th April 2007
Simon Willison - http://simonwillison.net/

What is it?
• Decentralised single-sign on for the Web
• You can reuse one account on multiple sites
• ... but you don’t have to cede ownership to a
single organisation

Who provides it?
• LiveJournal: ~10 million users
• AOL: ~65 million users
• WordPress.com: ~1 million users
• Many more
• Digg: coming soon

Who consumes it?
• AOL
• Ma.gnolia.com - 15% of signups
• 37 Signals’ Highrise: 9% of signups
• Technorati, for claiming your blog
• A growing number of startups

When should you use it?
• When you want lots of early adopters to try
out your service
• When you want to save your users the
hassle of maintaining yet another username
and password
• When you run a site for which people might
not be willing to perform full registration

It’s not just SSO...
• An OpenID is a URL - a globally unique
identifier
• Users can build one profile for use on
multiple sites
• With their permission, you can pull
information about them from other services
• “Friend import” is a great example

Identity projection
• What does it mean for users to be able to
project their identity from one service to
another?

Some caveats
• There is no guarantee that an OpenID isn’t
owned by a spammer
• An OpenID comes with almost no useful
information attached (you can request extra
information using simple registration)
• You’ll probably still want to use e-mail
confirmation, captchas and the like

It’s all about the
early adopters
• Early adopters are critical to the success of
any social website
• Early adopters have password pains that
aren’t yet affecting the mainstream
• When Digg adds support, a link from the
homepage will result in thousands of
OpenID users flooding to your site

• OpenID is one small piece of the identity
puzzle
• It’s not OpenID that’s exciting, it’s the things
that will be built on top of it