Google Account = OpenID

On Monday, Microsoft announced that it would give every Windows Live user an OpenID account, and yesterday, Google formally announced its support as a provider for the OpenID 2.0 protocol, i.e. If you have a Google account, you can also start using it as an OpenID. Google has launched an API that allows other websites to provide users with the option to login using their Google Account.

Eric Sachs from the Google Security Team writes:

Starting today, we are providing limited access to an API for an OpenID identity provider that is based on the user experience research of the OpenID community. Websites can now allow Google Account users to login to their website by using the OpenID protocol.

And Yariv Adan writes:

We chose OpenID as the protocol for our identity provider because it makes a large set of open source implementations available for many different development platforms used by Google Data API developers. To learn more about this new API see http://code.google.com/apis/accounts/docs/OpenID.html.

Update (Oct. 31)

1. An episode of thesocialweb.tv which covers the launch of Google's OpenID API.



2. A new post in Google Code Blog addressing 2 concerns about the current implementation:
- Users could not just use their Gmail accounts to log into any OpenID enabled site.
- Google itself did not accept OpenID to let users log into Google's own services.