blogger – Factory Joe

An update to my my OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist

Back in December, I posted my OpenID Shitlist, Hitlist and Wishlist. I listed 7 companies on my shitlist, 14 on hitlist and 12 on my wishlist. Given that it’s been all of two months but we’ve made some solid progress, I thought I’d go ahead and give a quick update on recent developments.

First, the biggest news is probably that Yahoo has come online as an OpenID 2.0 identity provider. This is old news for anyone who’s been watching the space, but given that I called them out on my wishlist (and that their coming online tripled the number of OpenIDs) they get serious props, especially since Flickr profile URLs can now be used as identity URLs. MyBlogLog (called out on my shitlist) gets a pass here since they’re owned by Yahoo, but I’d still like to see them specifically support OpenID consumption

Second biggest news is the fact that, via Blogger, Google has become both an OpenID provider (with delegation) and consumer. Separately, Brad Fitzpatrick released the Social Graph API and declared that URLs are People Too.

Next, I’ll give big ups to PBWiki for today releasing support for OpenID consumption. This is a big win considering they were also on my shitlist and I’d previously received assurances that OpenID for PBWiki would be coming. Well, today they delivered, and while there are opportunities to improve their specific implementation, I’d say that Joel Franusic did a great job.

And, in other good news, Drupal 6.0 came out this week, with support for OpenID in core (thanks to Walkah!), so there’s another one to take off my hitlist.

I’d really like to take Satisfaction off my list, since they’ve released their API with support for OAuth, but they’ve still not added support for OpenID, so they’re not out of the woods just yet… even though their implementation of OAuth makes me considerably happy.

So, that’s about it for now. I hear rumblings from Digg that they want to support OpenID, but I’ve got no hard dates from them yet, which is fine. There’re plenty more folks who still need to adopt OpenID, and given the support the foundation has recently received from big guys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Verisign and IBM, my job advocating for this stuff is only getting easier.

Blogger adopts OpenID site-wide

Clarification: The title of this post is a little misleading, as Oxa pointed out. Blogger has only enabled OpenID commenting site-wide. The author regrets any impression otherwise.

In what has to be a positive sign of things to come, Blogger has taken the OpenID commenting feature from beta to live in a matter of two weeks.

This is huge.

With great progress coming on OAuth Discovery, we’re rapidly approaching the plumbing needed to really start to innovate on citizen-centric web services… and social network portability.

Blogger Beta offers OpenID; or, I am mine.

Dave Recordon (and many, many, many others)points out that the Blogger Beta has added support for accepting OpenID for comments.

This is a watershed moment in terms of OpenID’s brief history as it seems to represent a change in the perception and utility of the protocol by a very significant potential proponent.

For once I can say to someone like Google, “No, you don’t know me, you’ve never let me use my own credentials — my own domain — where I’ve built up my reputation — to login to your system before. To date you’ve only let me use your siloed credentials to sign in against your servers… you never trusted me before. Today you’re starting to say, ‘Well, maybe it’s okay for you to tell me who you are using your own credentials.’”

Now, don’t think me getting wistful here.

OpenID is far from perfect (as Marshall Kirkpatrick has pointed out). But, with Internet Identity Workshop coming next week, we have a great opportunity to discuss the necessary improvements that need to happen around user experience, around security, around finalization of the protocol and around thinking through what possibilities a more “citizen centric web” might bring.

(Oh, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I like to use Pearl Jam song titles in my blog posts.)