OpenID - The next big thing. Start adapting NOW!
2007-02-28 10:53:07
OpenIDLately OpenID has been hitting the front page of digg, del.icio.us, and many other large websites. People have been talking about OpenID quite a bit in the last few weeks and there are many people out there who don't even know what OpenID is or what it's about. So I'm here to tell you what it is and why it's so big.While startups have been popping up left and right for over a year, most of the startups create their own user system. Which means that on almost every cool new startup's site, you have to create and manage a new account. OpenID is a decentralized identity system which allows you to create one single account and use it all across the web.
So what do I mean when I say 'decentralized identity'? Basically, you can host your identity on any server that you choose, whether you put up your own or use alternatives like myopenid.com. This means that if you want to keep your information away from individual websites you can use your OpenID account and login safely without giving your information away.
This is one of two reasons why OpenID is booming right now. Not only does it keep a lot of your information safe it also makes being a big time web service user much easier to manage. As I mentioned before you only have to manage your one account and you're all set.
Having a service such as this, where you can create your single account and use it everywhere has been a hard thing to accomplish, or at least make successful. The hard part about it has been the adoption process. Getting large well known sites, to implement the OpenID system hasn't been the easiest task, but now there are companies jumping on the bandwagon. The main reason for this is that it costs virtually nothing to implement and many people would like to use their OpenID accounts.
Though it may be too early to call I think that OpenID is going to be a huge success. It is really in the adoption phase at the moment, and I think that if people keep getting excited about having a decentralized account for all of their web accounts, more companies will continue to integrate it into their web services.
As for now, if you want to test out about openID, reserve yourself a name at :
https://www.myopenid.com/
and try to login at this one web2.0 website which has support for openID and you'll probably get the picture of how its going to work on other sites soon:
http://jyte.com/
Till then ... ^_^