The crowd is starting to get restless with new social networking sites springing up everyday. The recent buzz with Pownce has everyone wondering if they will now have to abandon Twitter for yet ANOTHER messaging tool. Even the king socialite Scoble seems to be getting tired of it in one of his latest posts titled Another Twitter competitor — want an invite?:
Now comes Pownce…
…Seriously, why do we care about this? It’s prettier than Twitter. It has more features than Twitter. And it was done by Kevin Rose of Digg fame (among a group of other cool kids).
But I’m getting tired of adding friends on all these social networks. I’m getting really anti social because of all of these things."
I can't say that I blame Mr. Scoble for feeling this way. Every time I sign up for a new site, I dread having to go search for friends, send them invites, blah, blah, blah. Enter OpenID…
This weekend Dan McWeeney and I were celebrating the nice weather in Palo Alto by having coding marathons out by the pool at the Residence Inn (what do you expect, we're geeks). Anyway, we were working on an application that used Facebook, Rails, and OpenID, that got us thinking and discussing…
OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.
OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity…
…To login to an OpenID-enabled website (even one you've never been to before), just type your OpenID URI. The website will then redirect you to your OpenID Provider to login using whatever credentials it requires. Once authenticated, your OpenID provider will send you back to the website with the necessary credentials to log you in.
Put in simple terms, you can sign up for an OpenID account one time and then use it on any site that implements OpenID for user sign in and authentication. I absolutely love this idea, and any web application that I develop, will definitely use OpenID if possible. You can see that adoption is starting to pick up by looking at sites like Zooomr, jyte, Pibb and a couple of the 37signals products:
Highrise was our first foray into accepting OpenID as a sign-in option. OpenID is a web-wide single sign-on service. You can find out more at the official OpenID site.
We then added OpenID sign-in to the Basecamp and Highrise forums. We also have OpenID running on an internal app. We're embracing OpenID. It's much easier than remembering multiple usernames and passwords for multiple sites.
OK, so if every new site would be gracious enough to use this, it would save us from having to remember hundreds of different user names and variations of passwords like lolcat01, lolcat02, and…well, you get the point. However, the dragging along of all your friends to different sites still remains a problem. Well, the good news is that it looks like OpenID has the potential to solve this problem. The bad news is that it doesn't quite do it just yet. Reading along on the OpenID homepage:
Beyond Authentication, the OpenID framework provides the means for users to share other components of their digital identity. By utilizing the emerging OpenID Attribute Exchange specification (see specs), users are able to clearly control what pieces of information can be shared by their Identity Provider, such as their name, address, or phone number.
OpenID implements a concept called personas. You can set up different personas (business, personal, etc.) that have different values for info like name and email address. This then allows an OpenID enabled website to not only ask you to authenticate, but it also allows you to send it certain blocks of information from a persona of your choice. Awesome, now you don't have to enter all of your personal information over and over again! The only shortcoming so far is that these personas only include a limited amount of info like nickname, name, email, birthdate, and a few others.
So here is my proposition for the OpenID guys over at JanRain. Please, oh please, for all of our sake, extend this functionality to include our friend information. For new sites, we then wouldn't have to create a new user, remember a new password, fill in our personal info, and drumroll…not even have to track down all of our friends again! It would also be great for viral marketing: "Would you like to send all of your OpenID friends an invite to [INSERT WEB 2.0ey SOCIAL SITE HERE]?". Even if it required your friends to have an OpenID themselves, I am sure adoption would spread like wildfire with the promise of saving us from friend gathering hell. Now that would make for some happy campers, especially if it could lift our dearest Scoble from his anti-social despair.
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