Not So Relevant

Who Supports OpenID at AOL?

There haven’t been much news about AOL and OpenID since AOL turned every AOL screenname into an OpenID back in February. Though last night AOL has announced support for OpenID’s from seven more providers (myOpenID, ClaimID, LiveJournal, Sun, VeriSign PIP, Vidoop, and VAuth). While it is good to see AOL becoming a Relying Party as well it is even more disappointing that it starts off whitelisting providers. Delegation works, though. I have tried logging in to AOL with my blog’s URL which delegates to myOpenID.

Other providers can apply for acceptance as well, I know, but it would have been more encouraging seeing one of the big internet companies accepting and implementing OpenID completely. It would have been a strong signal to the OpenID community as well as to other (big) companies.

I have no clue about coding and I don’t know anything about implementing OpenID into an existing system of a multi-faceted company like AOL but the explanation of the developers doesn’t sound very convincing to me:

We did finish the infrastructure work on the AOL login side, required to support 3rd party OpenID users to login into AOL, but being a pretty big company, we are struggling to get our Product teams to support it. But they are as usual busy implementing cool new features and functionality into their products that they haven’t yet experimented with OpenID support yet via OpenAuth and internal AOL Authentication System (called Screen Name Service). Since the AOL Account Management site is something in our control, we went ahead and added OpenID support to it - even though user’s cannot really do anything in there apart from changing their profile information.

Is this the positive signal to send out to the community? Is there even a strategy at AOL? It seems like there is not much support for OpenID from within the company. But I may be wrong and see things too negative but I am actually really disappointed.

[via Simon Willison]

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