OpenID Looks Like It Just Might Happen

In a situation similar to the next-gen disc war, universal identification protocols have been at a standstill for quite some time. The technology has been available for ages, but until now, few have been willing to make a firm commitment to any one approach. This sort behavior is completely understandable, of course. How willing were/are you to run out and drop a few hundred dollars on an HD or Blu-Ray player before knowing which brand will be triumphant in the great format battle? If you're like me, you probably weren't/aren't particularly eager to make such a purchase. If you're not like me, then I hope you either choose wisely or really enjoy movies made between 2005 and 2008, because that's about all you'll be able to watch on your fancy new multimedia device if it doesn't become the new standard. But anyhow, online identity management systems have been involved with the same dilemma. What company wants to invest in a technology that may very well become obsolete in a year or two? It's a catch twenty-two. Nobody wants to sign up because there isn't a large user base, but in order to get a larger user base, people need to sign up. There's only one clear solution as far as I can see – the powerhouses need to take the reigns and make a decision for the rest of us...

And finally, it's happened. Google, Microsoft, IBM, Yahoo and VeriSign seem to have come to an agreement, and the consensus is OpenID.

So what's this mean? It means that in the relatively near future (within the next two years?), we'll be done saving those text files with dozens of usernames and passwords, and registering for websites will start to become a thing of the past. Almost any time authentication is required on the Internet, our identity will be established by a single set of credentials. And even further down the road, our profiles (which I imagine to be like very extended Facebook profiles) will be utilized by several sites for personalized advertising and product recommendations, automatically customized news feeds, search suggestions, social networking and much, much more. The implementation of OpenID could be the beginning of a giant leap toward a fully “connected” Internet. Everything we do will feed into the always-expanding knowledge base about us. Finding what we want (whether we know exactly what that is or not) will be unbelievably efficient, because the online systems could quite possibly know us better than we know ourselves. While I'm personally optimistic about this whole movement, I do acknowledge that there's a price to pay for such openly available information. Below is a video that we watched in class the other day, which effectively communicates the fear many have about such smart systems.


Undoubtedly, we need to be careful about how we handle OpenID's, but I do believe that with well-designed privacy controls, nearly all of the problems suggested by this video could be eliminated. This is a good thing.