Yahoo! Open ID press coverage Key Quotes "If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron." - CNET "I am very happy to be able to say that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are joining the OpenID Foundation (on whose board I sit.) It marks the end of a lot of hard work by all parties involved, as well as -- at least for me personally -- the hope that we will be able to get a decentralized federated single sign-on technology across the internet." - O'Reilly Radar "There’s a whole lot of momentum right now for OpenID. In January Yahoo! increased the number of OpenID enabled user accounts by orders of magnitude, the long-awaited OpenID 2.0 spec was just recently finalized and the entire Data Portability paradigm is moving into the public consciousness quickly." -ReadWriteWeb "The OpenID Foundation, which oversees OpenID, the open source way to manage your online identity, scored a major coup today, announcing that representatives from Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo have all joined its board." - Wired Media Coverage CNET IDG Mashable O’Reilly Radar PC Magazine PCPro ReadWriteWeb TechCrunch TechCrunch UK WIRED Full Text Articles: CNET If the OpenID Foundation were a liquor cabinet, it just got stocked with some Grey Goose, Rhum Clement, and Gran Patron. The foundation, which is pushing for a universal Internet login standard, announced on Thursday that representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, and VeriSign have become its first corporate board members. They join existing board members Scott Kveton (Vidoop), David Recordon (Six Apart), Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity), Martin Atkins (independent), Artur Bergman (Wikia), Johannes Ernst (NetMesh), Drummond Reed (Parity Communications), and executive director Bill Washburn. Several major technology companies, including Yahoo, had already voiced support for the standard. OpenID started as a grassroots initiative to handle an increasingly complex Internet rife with user accounts, logins, and passwords galore, and some skeptics thought that it couldn’t possibly earn the approval of tech’s biggest players. But its creators have gone on to build serious Web credibility, which has undoubtedly helped the standard move from an experimental geek project toward industrywide adoption. Founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who developed the standard in 2005 while working at Six Apart, is now an engineer at Google and has been a key component of its OpenSocial developer initiative. “Google shares the OpenID Foundation’s vision of a Web that’s easy to use and built on open standards available to everyone,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement from the OpenID Foundation. “OpenID was always intended to be a decentralized sign-on system, so it’s fantastic (for Google) to join a foundation committed to keeping it free and unencumbered by proprietary extensions.” The representatives from the OpenID Foundation’s new corporate board members are Dewitt Clinton (Google), Tony Nadalin (IBM), Michael B. Jones (Microsoft), Gary Krall (VeriSign), and Shreyas Doshi (Yahoo). InfoWorld IBM, Google, Microsoft, Verisign, and Yahoo have joined the corporate board of the OpenID Foundation, giving a boost to the group’s efforts to simplify the process of signing into Web sites. Free IT resource The OpenID framework allows people to use a single user name and password to sign into sites that support it. More than 10,000 Web sites now support OpenID log-ins, according to the foundation. Last month, Yahoo announced its 248 million active registered users could begin using their handle and password to login to non-Yahoo Web sites that support the OpenID 2.0 framework. The closer links between OpenID and these major vendors is sure to help the foundation’s effort, according to its executive director, Bill Washburn. “The community has clearly expanded since the inception of the Foundation and these companies will help bring OpenID into the mainstream markets,” he said in a statement. Another statement on the foundation’s Web site went into further detail on what the new alliances could mean. “In 2008, we can expect to see a larger focus on making OpenID even more accessible to a mainstream audience, the development of a World-wide trademark usage policy (much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla have done), and a larger international focus on working with the OpenID communities in Asia and Europe,” it read. “We think this is one of the largest efforts put into identity management as far as the Internet is concerned,” said Anthony Nadalin, an IBM distinguished engineer and chief security architect for Tivoli software, in an interview Thursday. Nadalin couldn’t pinpoint when the vendors’ new level of involvement with OpenID will produce tangible results. “This takes a little bit of time, understanding and agreeing on the issues and where we need to drive this set of technology,” he said. “IBM is well-known for its ability to produce secure protocols,” he added. “We have quite a bit of talent to bring to this foundation.” He noted that Version 2.0 of the OpenID framework is still fairly new. “You can’t confuse the industry by coming in and throwing out a brand-new framework,” Nadalin said, “I think it’s coming down to that on the 2.0 level, we get the kind of interoperability we need.” Beyond sign-on, various efforts are underway to standardize how personal data can be moved around the Web. The Dataportability Workgroup wants to broaden the scope of portable data to things like user-created photos and videos. Mashable In case you had any doubts about it, OpenID has definitely proving to be the de facto standard for web identity. Many big names, including Google (through their Blogger service) and Yahoo announced their support for the standard, and now five big companies join OpenID Foundation’s corporate board: Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo. The foundation is not open only for huge corporations; basically, anyone can join - for a small fee. Students will have to pay their membership $50 per year, individuals will have to cough up $100, while companies have to pay various fees depending on their size. “With this support from the new company board members, the OpenID Foundation will be able to continue to promote and protect the technology and its community moving forward,” said Bill Washburn, Executive Director, OpenID Foundation. He’s right: support from these five heavyweights means that pretty much every site with a login will support OpenID in a year or two. O’Reilly Radar I am very happy to be able to say that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo are joining the OpenID Foundation (on whose board I sit.) It marks the end of a lot of hard work by all parties involved, as well as -- at least for me personally -- the hope that we will be able to get a decentralized federated single sign-on technology across the internet. My experience from co-authoring djabberd, as well as working on systems with large amount of end users, has taught me the value of decentralized federation. Just as I have multiple different jabber ids or email address for different contexts, I also want to have different identities that I can use in different contexts across multiple sites. From the beginning I was captivated by the promises of this system, and at Six Apart I worked to make sure it was available for widespread adoption. I would like to especially thank David Recordon for convincing me, and others to continue, and his tireless evangelization, which got him a 2007 Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award. It is fitting that he is now back at Six Apart. I am very greatful to the entire OpenID Community, the rest of the Foundation board and supporting companies who have taken it this far in a little over two and a half years. Brad Fitzpatrick created OpenID to solve the problem of people commenting between different installations of LiveJournal. Using a URL-based identity for blog commenting made perfect sense, as the identity you are commenting with is your blog. However, the URL-based identity does confuse people, and so at the Social Graph Foo Camp, Brad et al came up with a proposal to map email addresses to OpenID URLs. Perhaps the idea of just using your email address to login will be easier to understand. Another area where we see innovation enabled is that OpenID does not specify how you authenticate to your OpenID provider. We have seen examples of this innovation including putting OpenID in cellphones, connecting it with the Estonian National ID card, older standards like Kerberos, new desktop authentication technologies, one-time-password tokens, and even new markets being formed around phishing resistant web authentication. This kind of layered extensibility is why I find the design of OpenID so important, as I’ve written before. It is an enabling technology. The basic implementation allows exploration and I am looking forward to see what people can use it for. Again, thanks all of you who made it happen. Soon after Yahoo announced its support of the OpenID single sign-on identity system, some of the biggest names in the industry—Microsoft, IBM, Google, and VeriSign—have joined the OpenID Foundation’s board, according to the organization. The goal of the foundation is to establish an open-source technology that makes it easier for people to sign in to the ever-growing number of web sites and web applications, such as social networking sites, without risking identity theft and without needing to separately register for each. Another way to think of it is as a “portable identity.” Today’s additions to the board are likely to cement OpenID as the standard in this area. So far, Yahoo! is the only one of these companies to actually make a working implementation available for sites, though Google has tested the waters with comments on Blogger. It’s unclear what the move will mean with regard to Microsoft’s likely takeover of Yahoo!, and whether Windows Live IDs will be migrated to support the OpenID standard. Google and Microsoft may only want to use the system for users to sign up their sites and have it work on third-party sites, without accepting OpenID accounts created elsewhere. The foundation claims that today over 10,000 sites comply with the OpenID standard. Anthony Nadalin, IBM distinguished engineer and chief security architect for Tivoli software summed the project up this way: “This effort is intended to provide users with more control and to help them better manage and protect their digital identities.” Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick put more stress on the open aspect: “OpenID was always intended to be a decentralized sign-on system, so it’s fantastic to join a foundation committed to keeping it free and unencumbered by proprietary extensions,” he said. PCPro Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo have joined the board of the OpenID Foundation, as the single sign-in scheme gathers momentum. OpenID is a digital management standard that allows web users to register a single username and password that can then be used with any website that supports the system. The OpenID Foundation was created to promote the standard. “There is little doubt that the success of OpenID will be tied to the quality of the user experience it brings to millions of consumers,” says Nico Popp, the vice president of innovation at VeriSign. “The Foundation will take it further and enable a true ‘one-click’ or even ‘zero-click’ user experience for login, registration, payment and all other forms of internet activities. The Foundation will be the place to funnel the best ideas from the community and set the best deployment practices.” The scheme received a boost last month when it was announced that anybody with a Yahoo ID would be able to use it on OpenID supported sites, tripling its userbase at a stroke. ReadWriteWeb The OpenID Foundation is announcing this morning that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! have taken seats as the organization’s first corporate board members. OpenID is a protocol for authenticating your identity through a single chosen provider instead of creating unique accounts at every website you use. The Foundation, which was formed 18 months ago, says it “will not dictate the technical direction of OpenID; instead it will help enable and protect whatever is created by the community.” That often means legal paperwork (to keep a single company from patenting important open standards, for example), and that means money is needed. Cash will also help with some much needed marketing and communications efforts. Fortunately, the newest board members are buying the beer for meetings into the indefinite future; while a seat in the majority “community member” section of the board is free - corporations wanting to make up a minority part of the board have to make a financial donation to the foundation for the position. For users, OpenID means much easier account creation, better personalization, privacy and security when trying out new web sites. It makes for a greatly improved user experience. For websites and other companies, OpenID means more and happier users and potentially greater access to information about those users. There’s a whole lot of momentum right now for OpenID. In January Yahoo! increased the number of OpenID enabled user accounts by orders of magnitude, the long-awaited OpenID 2.0 spec was just recently finalized and the entire Data Portability paradigm is moving into the public consciousness quickly. All of that said, big vendors have a lot of short term interest in controlling identity silos. It won’t be easy to get their long term interests in openness to prevail. Fortunately, they are participating but are in the minority on the OpenID Foundation board. We wrote about the Foundation chair Scott Kveton’s new day job, at a particularly interesting OpenID vendor called Vidoop, earlier this week. There are many, many places you can get an OpenID and there are significant differences in advanced feature sets. To get a good look at the range of options and details beyond mere simple one-way authentication check out the vendor comparison at SpreadOpenID.org. If issues like these are of interest, check out the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for tracking top technology themes of 2008, including Data Portability and OpenID. TechCrunch As anticipated by TechCrunch UK in early January, OpenID is welcoming some big new partners to the club - Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM (TechCrunch UK anticipated all but Microsoft). Google has been dabbling with OpenID for some time with its Blogger platform (and Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of OpenID, is now a Google employee). Yahoo also announced support for OpenID earlier this month, which more than tripled the number of OpenID accounts to 350 million. 10,000 websites now accept OpenID accounts for login. All of the newcomers, along with Yahoo, have joined OpenID’s corporate board and, we assume, will be making their user accounts OpenID-compatible. But it’s not clear that any of them are in a hurry to become a “relying party” (allowing users with third party OpenIDs to log in to their sites). OpenID looks like it’s going to be a winner, so big companies making their user accounts OpenID compatible is a good hedge. Everyone, of course, wants to be an ID issuer, since they get to “own” the user. Less attractive is allowing users from other sites to log into your services, so don’t expect that functionality to come for some time. TechCrunch UK Confirming my TechCrunch UK story in early January, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM (I just missed out Microsoft) have all now formally announced they will be joining the OpenID foundation, taking seats as the organization’s first corporate board members. The Foundation, formed 18 months ago, says it “will not dictate the technical direction of OpenID; instead it will help enable and protect whatever is created by the community.” in other words the foundation will back the OpenID standard with money. Other companies wanting to join the board, rather than be a “community member” will also have to pay for the privilege. Digg, Technorati, AOL, Plaxo and WikiPedia have previously announced their intention to support the standard which is seen as an easy way for users to use a single digital identity across the Internet. Three weeks ago Yahoo officially jumped on the bandwagon, added its roughly 250 million user IDs, tripling the existing 120 million valid OpenID accounts in one move. The OpenID Foundation has worked feverishly behind the scenes to convince all the major Internet players that a single log-in for their services could increase consumer adoption of new web services and applications. It’s no coincidence that Brad Fitzpatrick, leader of the Google-led OpenSocial project is also widely credited as the creator of the OpenID concept. Google had already rolled out OpenID support for comments on it Blogger platform back in November. With Google, Microsoft, Verisign, and IBM joining the OpenID movement, the initiative is now firmly on track to become the defacto standard for ‘single-sign-on’ identity online. WIRED
|
|