Not So Relevant

The Telegraph: More Info about the OpenID Implementation

While I got severely critisized for my short post on the Telegraph’s OpenID endeavors on Monday, I got in touch with the Telegraph’s Shane Richmond to find out more about the announcement. Shane and Chris Gomez (responsible for the tech info) were kind enough to get back to me with some answers.

So the Telegraph will indeed be both a provider and consumer of OpenIDs, supporting both specs, OpenID 1.1 and 2.0. Also it will accept OpenIDs from all providers. That’s some welcome clarification as some bloggers and commenters thought there was no need for another provider, especially if it didn’t consume other OpenIDs as well. This was mentioned in Shane’s blog post but it was overlooked often, it seems.

At first OpenIDs will be used for login to My Telegraph - a part of the site where users can start blogs, discuss and bookmark articles - but according to Shane it will also

form the foundation of developments planned for later this year

Whatever this means. By the end of 2007 My Telegraph had about 14,000 users. So all of them will have an OpenID, too.

Often people wonder why webservices should adopt OpenID. Well, read the answer below. It’s notable that the explanation is by a well-established service and not some newish startup.

Adopting OpenID offers benefits to our users, makes it easy for newcomers to the Telegraph to join our community and offers benefits to our technical team because they don’t have to reinvent the wheel

I assume the majority of the Telegraph’s users are not some nerdy tech folks. So let’s see if ordinary users accept OpenID.

Related posts:

• British Newspaper Telegraph will Adopt OpenID
• User Friendly OpenID Implementation
• OpenID not about the User?
• OpenID Skepticism in Germany
• Some Ideas for Relying Parties