Get into OpenID!

I have been seeing an increasing frequency of the term OpenID online these days, blogs, wikis, devnets, ..

Interestingly, while browsing my del.icio.us network yesterday, I came across a free anonymous/temporary OpenID provider at:

• http://www.jkg.in/openid

Something of similar concept with My Trash Mail. I have some chats with Sarah as well the same night about the crappy social networks surrounding us these days. However, there are some good ones which help driving one's personal growth and goals,

• My 43 Things to Do
• My 43 People to Meet
• My Consumption

So I created a goal that is to get into OpenID. If you are not familiar with the concept, it is basically a distributed and decentralized single sign on (SSO) solution. You will be given an OpenID which is basically a URL, e.g.

• http://yclian.opinity.com

This URL can be used as an authentication mechanism for other accounts you have in the Internet, such as your blogs, social networks, emails, websites. With OpenID, as long as you are signed on, you will be signed into any other of your accounts automatically.

If you are interested to read more about it and what's going on behind the scene, please refer to:

• http://www.openid.net/wiki/ (wiki)
  
• http://www.openidenabled.com (for developers)
  

You may create multiple OpenIDs as you may not like to use the same identity for different purposes, for instance, separating social network and business ID. Here are a few OpenID providers which can give you a good start:

• MyOpenID
• Opinity
• VeriSign
• Virtual Identity

I have also come across Atlassian Developer Blog about their SSO tool "Crowd" will be OpenID-enabled in the end of May. That sounds interesting.

As OpenID is growing in a high momentum, we will be seeing more and more companies and sites to support it in the very near future, such as Digg, Microsoft, ...

Stay tuned.

- yc, opened