In July of last year, Microsoft threw its weight behind supporting the OpenID protocol. In February of this year, Microsoft joined the OpenID foundation's board. Now, Microsoft has committed to OpenID further by announcing that Windows Live will become a OpenID provider and that you will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID enabled website.OpenID is a distributed authentication method for allowing users to securely use a single digital ID to sign into multiple websites on the Internet. AOL and Yahoo already allow users to authenticate against their AOL or Yahoo credentials on sites using OpenID. Google so far has not adopted OpenID through any supported means.
Currently Microsoft's OpenID implementation is on their Windows Live ID Integration environment, intended for sites and software providers who provide OpenID authentication to test against the service. Your normal Windows Live ID cannot currently be used for OpenID. Microsoft does not seem to have any plans to allow the use of your OpenID to login to sites that require a Windows Live ID. Meaning you'll still need to maintain accounts at Yahoo, AOL and Windows Live to login to services on their individual sites. However, in becoming a provider, Microsoft has taken a step in the right direction towards opening up their services.
Microsoft has given no specifics on when they plan to make OpenID authentication available on their public servers.
View: Sign-Up for Testing
Good in theory, impossible in practice.
But that's not really the problem. Hell it could be free but other big companies like AOL and Yahoo etc would never use MSs service anyways. Price is not really the issue here when it comes to the big websites.
I'd personally be happy to use a MS one to be honest. The thing is larger companies won't and while theres licensing fees smaller ones aren't going to be able to consider it.
Says the person who doesn't know the difference between a centralised versus federated system - and the fact that many of the partners weren't going to deal with a system which demanded that they (the partners) turn over their customer data wholesale and then purchase it back at a fee.
Microsoft is delusional if they though people would jump on passport given business reality. Customer data is an asset, and certainly not something to be given away to Microsoft then rented back at a fee each month/year.
Microsoft's Passport system doesn't compare much to OpenID, since it was proprietary, closed and centralized. That's not very good for adoption, both implementor-wise and user-wise. In these respects, OpenID is the complete opposite.
The thing with decentralized authentication is that it's not feasable to allow anybody to magically be able to log in a large complex system. It works extremely well on blogs and forums, but you can't reasonably implement that on an e-mail or IM service. I don't expect Microsoft ever to allow signing in with an openID, but I don't (in response to PureLegend) beleive this is something that makes openID futile. Now everyone with an MSN address can use their credential to post on countless sites without having to register.
Jump forward several years were people see that MS wasn't so crazy and even though it is not the MS version that people put together, the concept they shoved down people's throats (via Messenger/Hotmail) for several years is now going to come to fruition.
So in a weird way, MS gets kudos for kickstarting the concepts and then kudos again for not shoving their version down our throats and jumping into the pool with everyone else instead.
Maybe the era of 'Gates' thinking is returning to MS and they are becoming a smarter kinder company again. (Yes I am NOT a fan of Ballmer thinking, or the drones that shove that thinking in some of their software that creates a lock-in mentality. And yes I remember a MS that was about giving users more for less and taking on the status quo.)
Jump forward several years were people see that MS wasn't so crazy and even though it is not the MS version that people put together, the concept they shoved down people's throats (via Messenger/Hotmail) for several years is now going to come to fruition.
So in a weird way, MS gets kudos for kickstarting the concepts and then kudos again for not shoving their version down our throats and jumping into the pool with everyone else instead.
Maybe the era of 'Gates' thinking is returning to MS and they are becoming a smarter kinder company again. (Yes I am NOT a fan of Ballmer thinking, or the drones that shove that thinking in some of their software that creates a lock-in mentality. And yes I remember a MS that was about giving users more for less and taking on the status quo.)
It certainly can't hurt.
Google lets you enable your Blogger blogs for use as OpenID identifiers. So, if I want, I can use http://aalaap.blogspot.com as my OpenID. This feature has been in place since January. Even though it needs a "labs" (Blogger in Draft) switch to enable, anyone can do it and it works just fine. More info: http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2008/01...d-provider.html
Also, Blogger also lets you login with your OpenID (not necessarily from Blogger) to post comments on Blogger blogs. None of the others let you do anything with an external OpenID. And you're saying Google has not adopted OpenID through any supported means? Come on!
Last edited by aalaap on 31 Oct 2008 - 03:29
Google has announced they are supporting OpenID, but not the version everyone else is using, nor will they allow backwards compatibility, and they also are adding in their own 'proprietary' features making their OpenID adoption USELESS outside of Google content.
Google is taking the place of IBM-MS, in the Giant/Evil corporate role. They are so hell bent on doing things THEIR way and even going around companies they hate, like MS, they are willing to screw over consumers in the process. -Besides people often forget they are a marketing and Ad company, not a solution provider and really don't care past advertising revenue and what products they can create to get people use their crap to leverage this.
-Read your GMail lately, its ok if you haven't, Google does it for you, so they know what advertising to shove at you to sell the information to their partners. (Test it, email Grandma a couple of times about a cool camera, and you will start seeing Web ads of companies selling that camera.)
Commenting has either been disabled on this article or you are not logged in. Click here to login or register, its free!
Note: Anonymous commenting is disabled in order to keep the quality of responses to a high standard.