Tracy Phillips

Is Google breaking OpenID by not adhering to the already established standards?

I am glad they are embracing OpenID, the problem I have is how they are going about it. To make OpenID work, everyone needs to be on the same sheet of music. Google’s new way is to have you enter your email address instead of your OpenID provider URL.

With that said, I do like the concept of your email provider being your OpenID provider as well, one less thing to remember (not that its hard to remember a URL), and after all OpenID was created to help consolidate the multitude of authentications that you already have to remember.

I am not a big fan of “embrace and extend” when it breaks the system down. If they wish to extend the way OpenID works, there should be a consensus within the OpenID community.

I just finished watching Dick Hardt’s entertaining presentation on Identity 2.0 at OSCON 2005.

There is not a lot of meat into what his company Sxip (pronounced skip) is doing with Identity 2.0, but it does get you to thinking about what Identity actually means and that with web apps there needs to be a method for presenting your identity to the Internet in a trusted fashion. Currently we have authentication but that really doesn’t tell who we are as individuals. Hopefully real identity will come together as part of Web 2.0.