OpenID for Entrepreneurs

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

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OpenID for Entrepreneurs

by Simon Willison

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