Announcements, Rumours, Euphoria
10. January 2008 – 21:09 byThis week we have seen a slew of announcements and rumours regarding data portability and OpenID. Let’s summarize quickly:
- Google, Facebook, and Plaxo join DataPortability.org
- Linkedin, Flickr, Six Apart, and Twitter are following today; others might join later
- Flickr’s source code has hints at OpenID adoption
- Google, IBM, and VeriSign are rumoured to join the OpenID Foundation
This is all great and I stick to my initial euphoria but somehow I am reminded of last year when everyone and their mother made announcements to adopt OpenID. Just talk! Also let’s put things in perspective. DataPortability.org is a working group and everyone can join one. Also it doesn’t mean that every company who sends representatives will have to implement the results of months and at worst years of talks and work. Most members of the working group won’t decide what their companies will actually do; they have bosses to ask. And lawyers. Yes lawyers. If the working group can agree on technical details there will be privacy questions to solve. And I guess that will be tricky considering especially European laws.
Will things change when Google, IBM, and VeriSign join the OpenID Foundation? Google has made first steps towards OpenID by enabling OpenID comments on blogging platform Blogger. VeriSign is already an OpenID provider and if I’m not mistaken IBM folks helped finalizing the OpenID Intellectual Property Rights policy. It’s not clear what it meant if those companies joined the foundation. Basically it’s support of OpenID because the foundation was formed
to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community. This will entail managing intellectual property, brand marks as well as fostering viral growth and global participation in the proliferation of OpenID. The OIDF will not dictate the technical direction of OpenID; instead it will help enable and protect whatever is created by the community.
And Flickr - a Yahoo! property - becoming an OpenID provider? Well, that might be news actually. But let’s wait until it is announced officially. Until then relax and hope for the best. 
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