[Infowarrior] - OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?

[Richard Forno]

Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?
Michael Arrington

OpenID, a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign
into different services with the same login credentials, gained significant
momentum over the last year as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all pledged
their support for the initiative.

There are two ways companies/websites can participate in the OpenID
framework - as ³issuing parties² or as ³relying parties.² Issuing parties
make their user accounts OpenID compatible. Relying parties are websites
that allow users to sign into their sites with credentials from Issuing
parties. Of course, sites can also be both. In fact, if they aren¹t both it
can be confusing and isn¹t a good user experience.

The problem, though, is that the Big Four Internet companies that I
mentioned above have made big press announcements about their support for
OpenID, but haven¹t done enough to actually implement it. Microsoft has done
absolutely nothing, even though Bill Gates announced their support over a
year ago. Google has limited its support to Blogger, where it is both an
Issuing and Relying party. Yahoo and AOL are Issuing parties only.

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http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/03/24/is-openid-being-exploited-by-the-big-in
ternet-companies/