OpenID Explained

Via Mike Qaissaunee.

OpenID Explained provides valuable information about OpenID with a list of OpenID providers.

OpenID on Change.gov

Via ReadWriteWeb.

After Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, President Elect Barack Obama's Change.gov is now supporting OpenID to post comments on selected discussions. The site uses the commenting plug-in system Intense Debate; a blog commenting plugin that works on almost every blogging platform. That's a great success for both OpenID and Intense Debate.

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.

Microsoft Windows Live Supports OpenID

OpenID - the "free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet" - is now supported by Microsoft Windows Live. Microsoft describes OpenID as the "emerging, de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication". According to Microsoft "We look forward to making it easier for our users to access the Web sites they use, by reducing their need to create additional identity accounts. That is the promise of OpenID. We are happy to support that goal by providing OpenID-based sign-in functionality to Windows Live ID account holders".


Windows Live ID OpenID Provider Screencast from Angus Logan on Vimeo.

The Personal Learning Environment Framework (PLEF)

In contrast to traditional LMS-driven e-learning solutions, a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) takes a more natural and learner-centric approach and is characterized by the freeform use of a set of lightweight services and tools that belong to and are controlled by individual learners. Rather than integrating different services into a centralized system, the idea is to provide the learner with a plethora of different services and hand over control to her to select, use, and mashup the services the way she deems fit. A PLE driven approach does not only provide personal spaces, which belong to and are controlled by the user, but also requires a social context by offering means to connect with other personal spaces for effective knowledge sharing and collaborative knowledge creation (Chatti et al., 2007).

The Personal Learning Environment Framework (PLEF) supports the learners in taking control over their learning experience by aggregating, managing, tagging, commenting, and sharing their favorite resources (e.g. feeds, widgets, and different media) within a personalized space. PLEF differs from popular personalized start pages such as iGoogle, My Yahoo, Netvibes, or Pageflakes mainly in six important points:

1. PLEF uses OpenID for authentication.
2. PLEF supports commenting and sharing of all PLE elements.
3. Access control is defined at both PLE page and element levels.
4. Besides a traditional page view, PLEF provides a tag view of all PLE elements. Learners can add tags in order to be able to classify, categorize, search and re-find their PLE elements at a later time.
5. PLEF provides a navigation sidebar where you can (1) drag-and-drop to move PLE elements between pages or change the order of the pages, and (2) click a tag to see its associated elements.
6. PLEF supports full-text and tag-based search of PLE elements.

You can see here an example of a PLEF page I created to follow the ongoing distributed discussion on connectivism and connective knowledge.

Technologies used for the development of PLEF include Google GWT and GWT-Ext that I would highly recommend for your AJAX applications.

Please feel free to visit the project homepage and test PLEF. This is a first step toward a personal learning environment framework which should meet the requirements discussed here. I would dearly love to hear your opinions on the ideas behind PLEF and in particular your suggestions to supplement this work. If you would like to contribute a short report of your experiences with PLEF, report bugs, support the development of this project, or take on the development yourself, please don't hesitate to contact me.

Google Friend Connect at Google Campfire One

Yesterday, Google announced the preview release of Google Friend Connect at Campfire One. "Google Friend Connect enables webmasters to quickly and easily enhance their site with community features; what's more, these features leverage visitors' existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, you can implement the social functionality you want, and visitors can connect with their Facebook, orkut and other friends directly on your website."
Here's a video from Campfire One introducing Friend Connect.



From a press release on May 12:

Websites that are not social networks may still want to be social -- and now they can be, easily. With Google Friend Connect (see http://www.google.com/friendconnect following this evening's Campfire One), any website owner can add a snippet of code to his or her site and get social features up and running immediately without programming -- picking and choosing from built-in functionality like user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

"Google Friend Connect is about helping the 'long tail' of sites become more social," said David Glazer, a director of engineering at Google. "Many sites aren't explicitly social and don't necessarily want to be social networks, but they still benefit from letting their visitors interact with each other. That used to be hard. Fortunately, there's an emerging wave of social standards -- OpenID, OAuth, OpenSocial, and the data access APIs published by Facebook, Google, MySpace, and others. Google Friend Connect builds on these standards to let people easily connect with their friends, wherever they are on the web, making 'any app, any site, any friends' a reality."

Here’s also a video provided by Google that explains how developers can add Friend Connect to their websites:



Last week, in the same direction, Myspace and Facebook announced two competing products MySpace Data Availability and Facebook Connect.

DataPortability Project

A press release to present the progress within the DataPortability project as of November 2007.

Six months from its start, the DataPortability Project has advanced the conversation about user data rights. The project's volunteers have worked together to develop a uniquely open, transparent and effective community; earn support from standards groups and vendors; initiate documentation of technical best practices; and introduce a trustmark for the data web. DataPortability Connect.Control.Share.Remix

OpenID Providers

Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb has recently compiled a good list of OpenID providers, resources, and major sites supporting this authentication standard. More information about OpenID is available here.

Portability in Social Networks

In this post, Sean Ammirati gives an introduction to 4 important technologies for portability in social networks:

• hCard
• XFN and FOAF (Recently used by Google for the Social Graph API)
• OpenID
  
• OAuth

Yahoo meets OpenID

Yahoo announced its support of the OpenID 2.0 standard.

Yahoo, which counts its registered users at 248 million worldwide, says that supporting OpenID will mean that OpenID-compatible accounts are available to a total of 368 million Web users. When Yahoo's support of OpenID goes live, starting with a public beta launch on January 30, this will mean that a Yahoo ID can be consolidated into an OpenID account that will be valid at all partner sites.

Big Web players like Google and AOL have already begun supporting this open identification standard and Yahoo is the next on the list. I believe that OpenID will have a great future. It's just a matter of time that Google will offer a full support of OpenID. To note that Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal and creator of OpenID joined Google last year to support the OpenSocial developer initiative.

More OpenID links are available here.

Blogger’s OpenID Now Final

The OpenID-based commenting feature on Blogger is no longer in Draft. Now, OpenID commenting is available for all Blogger blogs.


Blogger has chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL/AIM, but it's also possible to use any OpenID service (e.g. myOpenID, Verisign, or OpenID.org or any other service that implements OpenID) to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.

A list of interesting posts/links related to OpenID is available here.

OpenID 2.0 Final

OpenID 2.0 is finally a released specification. The announcement by the OpenID community yesterday stated:

It’s important to remember that this has been the work of many folks not only within the OpenID community but also the OpenID Foundation, AOL, Cordance, JanRain, Microsoft, NetMesh, Six Apart, Sxip, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Yahoo!. Microsoft was instrumental in helping with legal support and guidance combined with the insight of Sun and Yahoo! with their joint work in developing the right language. This is great news as it means that today not only is OpenID 2.0 final, but all of the contributors have sent a strong message that OpenID must be freely implementable world-wide.

Last week Google and Microsoft also showed their support of OpenID. In the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View CA, both Microsoft and Google included OpenID features in beta products. Google announced the ability to comment on Blogger blogs using OpenID and Microsoft Research announced an experimental Provider.

SunID: OpenID at Sun

Sun yesterday announced

a new initiative around support for OpenID, a decentralized, web-friendly single sign-on mechanism that allows consumers to reuse a single login across different websites, tackling the "login explosion" problem. OpenID is currently limited to facilitating low-risk transactions such as blog comments. Through its new initiative, Sun is exploring what changes and practices are needed to make OpenID applicable to a broader spectrum of business and IT challenges. The company will actively encourage participation from customers and technology partners through a series of activities and real-life implementations that are initially driven by Sun's Chief Technologist's Office.

Brady Forrest from O´Reilly Radar writes:

A lot of companies have started supporting OpenID one way or another (Radar post -- Microsoft supports it in Vista, Yahoo's Authentication APIs can be made to support OpenID, and AOL will be an OpenID provider). However, Sun is the only one to make it more of an employee tool instead of a consumer one.

In an earlier post, I put together a list of interesting resources on OpenID that I´m trying to update regularly.

OpenID Links

OpenID is an open, decentralized identity system that attempts to provide a solution to the multiple log on ID systems to access various sites across the internet. At O´Reilly Radar, Brady Forrest gives some of OpenID Pros:

• You probably already have one - Via your AOL page or SixApart blog
• You can make your own website into an OpenID provider - This is very simple and is what makes it so appealing to bloggers.
• Saves you time when trying new sites and features - You already know your namespace is available
• Desktop support is coming via Vista and Firefox 3.0
  
• Easy to maintain multiple identities - All you need are different URLs
• It's decentralized - Not owned by any one company (MS Passport) or standards body (Liberty Alliance)

More and more sites and companies are OpenID enabled. On February 20 the ReadWriteWeb blog states "Digg is the latest company to declare its support for OpenID. This follows on from recent announcements of support from Microsoft and AOL. And as Techcrunch noted, Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are some other organizations that had previously announced their support".

More interesting Links/Blogposts on OpenId: (the following list will be updated regularly, kindly let me know if you know other links)

• OpenID Status Check: A Guide to Getting and Using your OpenID (Apr 3, 2008)
  
• Another victory for OpenID: Yahoo Announces Support (Jan 17, 2008)
  
• OpenID Commenting (Dec 13, 2007)
  
• OpenID 2.0 Final (Dec 6, 2007)
  
• OpenID 2.0...Final(ly) (Dec 5, 2007)
  
• 40 Million France Telecom Customers Get OpenID (Sep 25, 2007)
  
• A Beginner´s Guide to OpenID (Sep 2, 2007)
  
• Eight top OpenID providers comparison (Sep 2, 2007)
• SSL comes to claimID (Aug 31, 2007)
  
• About OpenID (Aug 20, 2007)
  
• Drupal 6 gets OpenID support! (June 19, 2007)
• Using OpenID (May 2007)
  
• Identity management - Sun Java System Access Manager
  
• Sun Supports OpenID: Steps Towards Enterprise? (May 8, 2007)
• OpenID at Work (May 7, 2007)
  
• Setting up your own OpenID server (May 3, 2007)
  
• OpenID presentations
• phpMyOpenID by Ben Dodson (April 24, 2007)
  
• Google Tech Talk on OpenID (April 20, 2007)
• Acegi OpenID (April 20, 2007)
  
• OpenID at Web 2.0 Expo (Apr 18, 2007)
  
• OpenID: a step forward for e-learning standards (Mar 8, 2007)
• 8 OpenID Resources for Rails Developers (Mar 8, 2007)
• OpenID Builds more Popularity (Mar 7, 2007)
  
• Wordpress, 37 Signals Join OpenID Bandwagon (Mar 7, 2007)
  
• Public OpenID providers
  
• Six cool things you can build with OpenID (Feb 25, 2007)
  
• Pros and Cons of OpenID (Feb 22, 2007)
• Poll: Do You Actually Use OpenID (Feb 20, 2007)
• Digg adopts OpenID (Feb 20, 2007)
  
• Why AOL Created 63 Million New OpenIDs (Feb 19, 2007)
• AOL supports OpenID (Feb 16, 2007)
• Five Key Takeaways From Microsoft, OpenID Announcement (Feb 14, 2007)
• Microsoft to Support OpenID Log on System (Feb 6, 2007)
• OpenID Gets a Boost From Microsoft (Feb 6, 2007)
• OpenID, Get it from Yahoo! & Avoid Phishing (Jan 29, 2007)
• Use your own URL as an OpenID (Jan 24, 2007)
  
• Throwaway Identities (Jan 23, 2007)
• OpenID (Jan 16, 2007)
• OpenID and the Identity Systems of Yahoo, Google & MSN (Jan 3, 2007)
• OpenID for non SuperUsers (Jan 3, 2007)
• How to use OpenID (a screencast)
  

Personal Learning Environments and OpenID

I had a short discussion with Wolfgang Neuhaus on OpenID and Personal Learning Environments (PLE). In an earlier post I wrote “we don´t need a trusted site that supports OpenID and acts as an identity provider, our PLEs will be our identities”. Wolfgang then asked me "What does that mean? If I use all the different services of my PLE, how do I login to each one without OpenID? I want to forget this huge package of passwords that I am carryíng around all the time …".
My answer to Wolfgang´s question was that a URL is one type of identifiers that can be used with OpenID, so why not to use the link to a PLE -which should be unique- to login on all OpenID-enabled sites? The identity provider in this case would act similar to UDDI registry for Web Services. That is, we just need to register the link to our PLE to what I would call “OpenID registry” or "PLE registry".

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

OpenID

Just came across this interesting Read/WriteWeb post on OpenID. "OpenID is being managed under meritocracy rules, just like any other big open source project. Specs are under continuous development. The current spec 1.1 will be deprecated in favor of the upcoming 2.0, which will feature YADIS service discovery, security enhancements, anonymous logging capability and XRI (i-name i-number)".
This post also contains the screencast I´m including below to show how OpenID works.


Note: click the play button to start
(Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openid_vs_bigco.php)