If you have read Techmeme or Planet OpenID today you already know about the news. Industry heavy-weights Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the OpenID Foundation as its first corporate members. The rumours about the companies joining the Foundation are around since a few weeks already but are eventually confirmed today.
Unlike the recent hype about the Data Portability Group and company representatives joining it, these companies have actually co-operated with the OpenID community before any announcements were made about joining or deploying OpenID. They helped formulating and finishing the Intellectual Property Rights policy which probably helped ensuring them that they can provide and use code without fearing legal hassles. Also finalizing OpenID 2.0 was equally important, I guess; without it Yahoo! still wasn’t a provider. So this is not just talk.
As Mathew Ingram pointed out rightly, though, OpenID got a real boost if all those companies and their services became relying parties as well. Currently only Google’s Blogger platform accepts OpenIDs from other providers. Though actually I am convinced that we will see one or two of those companies becoming a relying party this year as well.
It will be interesting to see how the companies will influence the way the Foundation is heading. They could build some pressure on it, though they are still in the minority compared to the community members represented there (see Johannes Ernst’s post).
This is a good day for OpenID.
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Tags: Blogger, Blogger platform, Data Portability Group, Google, IBM, Johannes Ernst, Mathew Ingram, Microsoft, OpenID Foundation, Yahoo
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today we see first time a great public articel about OpenID in the german online magazin “Der Spiegel”.
See http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/0,1518,533988,00.html -
Just read the article. Well, it has quite a lot of errors and inaccuracies and also makes assumptions that can’t be proved. Some of them:
I guess the community board members won’t subscribe to a sentence like this one: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have supported the OpenID Foundation for quite some time – now apparently they want to take over the helm themselves.
Also it’s odd that the author first writes about the dangers of phishing and then suggests that users might choose (among other providers) ClaimID over Yahoo! (because it was supposedly using login data for commercial interests). I like ClaimID a lot but it wasn’t my first choice if phishing was a major concern to me. Unlike providers like MyOpenID and VeriSign PIP it allows direct login from the landing page.
Also it’s strange to read that OpenID was worrying for privacy advocates and law enforcement agencies. Though the author doesn’t quote anyone to prove that assumption. While privacy concerns are mentioned in the article, it is not mentioned at all why it might be worrying to law enforcement.
Well, the article could be much worse actually. For those who don’t know, Der Spiegel is the leading German weekly news magazine (about 1 million sold copies each week). Its online edition also ranks number one with 70 million visits each month; it’s also the most quoted source on the German net.
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