Last month I wrote about 2007 being “The Year of OpenID”. Much of this was based on the buzz surrounding AOL, Digg, and others displaying their support of the new identity standard via becoming OpenID providers. In order for OpenID to become the online identity standard in 2007, let alone ever, there will need to be a movement within the industry. Given that most of the leaders in the industry are bloggers, and OpenID has become increasingly popular with bloggers (as illustrated below), I think that it is definitely possible for this movement to take place.

Yesterday, Nik Cubrilovic highlighted the problem. Although all these people are becoming OpenID providers, they aren’t accepting it as a login. How do we take the initial movement that started a couple months ago and make it a reality? We need the thought leaders within each of the major organizations that currently maintain identities (MySpace, Match.com, AOL, Yahoo, etc) to start accepting OpenID as a valid way of logging in. There is no way of piquing the mainstream’s interest of OpenID until the mainstream begins to see at least one OpenID login. The mainstream definitely isn’t going to any of these sites that support OpenID. So how about it thought leaders? Will you make OpenID a reality, or will you let it pass?

Yesterday, Simon Willion announced that you can now use your Wordpress.com blog as an OpenID. This is good stuff. Next step, major sites need to start accepting OpenID as a valid login. I think that the real tipping point will happen once major email sites (Gmail, Hotmail, etc) and social networks (MySpace, Facebook, etc) decide to start accepting OpenID as a valid login. It would also be great if Wordpress enabled users that have a custom install on their own server to create their own OpenID server via a simple plugin. I’ve been thinking about integrating OpenID Enabled into a Wordpress plugin. I’m sure someone is already working on this …. anybody?

I’ve been M.I.A. for the past few days since I was attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London. I will cover more about the conference in my coming entries but the really exciting news coming out of the conference is that both Digg and Netvibes are going to start offering OpenID support. It seems as though there was big push for the companies at the event to promise to add OpenID support. I think Michael Arrington might have had a little something to do with the OpenID announcement, but that’s another story. Regardless, it’s pretty exciting to see companies hopping on the OpenID bandwagon. I think that my assertion that 2007 will be the year of OpenID is rapidly coming true.

In the past few weeks there has been a bunch of steps take toward making OpenID the identity standard on the web. At the end of January I questioned whether OpenID is going mainstream with the addition of OpenID to Firefox 3.0. A week later, I wrote about Kim Cameron’s announcement of OpenID becoming interoperable with Windows CardSpace. Just yesterday, Johannes Ernst said that AOL is building in OpenID to their infrastructure. It’s beginning to look like this may just be the year of OpenID. Will everyone be using one login for all their memberships in the next year? At this rate, I would bet on the masses beginning to embrace OpenID by the end of the year. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Last week I examined whether or not OpenID has gone mainstream with the integration of Firefox 3.0 and OpenID. As of today another big step has been taken to ensure the future success of the web identity standard. Kim Cameron has announced a new collaboration to ensure interoperability between OpenID and Windows CardSpace. If you are interested in online identity I highly recommend checking out the article.

What if you could login to all the sites that you are a member of with only one login and password? All of that could become possible with the broad acceptance of a standard called OpenID. I hadn’t heard of OpenID until recently when the standard was discussed in relation to one of my client projects. Since then I have been hearing more and more about the proliferation of the OpenID standard. Logging in to websites could become much easier with the acceptance of this digital identity standard. How do you login to a site that accepts OpenID? According to their website:

To login to an OpenID-enabled website (even one you’ve never been to before), just type your OpenID URI. The website will then redirect you to your OpenID Provider to login using whatever credentials it requires. Once authenticated, your OpenID provider will send you back to the website with the necessary credentials to log you in. By using Strong Authentication where needed, the OpenID Framework can be used for all types of transactions, both extending the use of pure single-sign-on as well as the sensitivity of data shared.

By logging in to a site that accepts OpenID, you are granting that site access to the information that you have selected to share via your OpenID provider. While I think that OpenID has a long way to go until it is accepted as the primary login/registration method for websites, it is the front-runner in the digital identity world. With the integration of OpenID in to Firefox 3.0, great strides are being made to ensure the acceptance of the new standard. I think the primary barrier to success is going to be acceptance by the mainstream web users. I believe the implementation of OpenID by a major web portal (Google, Yahoo, etc) will serve as the tipping point.