The Espionage

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch posted an article about OpenID yesterday about the big four (Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and AOL) becoming issuing parties of OpenIDs but not relying parties of OpenIDs.  In English that means that you can get an OpenID at Yahoo, but you can’t use your Yahoo OpenID at AOL, for example.  Even though AOL is an OpenID provider, they are not a consumer, and therefore you can’t use your Yahoo OpenID to log in to AOL.  There is an interview posted on the Yahoo Developer Network between Yahoo Rep Christian Heilmann and OpenID advocate Chris Messina concerning Yahoo’s implementation of OpenID.  In that interview, this exact topic comes up.

Christian (Yahoo Rep):  In December you published a wishlist on OpenID and support by Yahoo! was one of the wishes. Have you taken a look at what was done, how do you think we are doing so far and what would you want to see next?

Chris:  Well, I think it’s excellent to see Yahoo! become a provider. That’s huge and really gives OpenID a needed push in both its longterm viability and in validating the investment people will make in becoming OpenID consumers. But providing OpenIDs is the easy part; for Yahoo to really earn full credit, it needs to consume OpenIDs, and so I’m hopeful that that will happen in time as well.

Translation:  “You half assed it”.  To be honest, the blame should fall on OpenID.  I wouldn’t have built the libraries to allow providers denial of consumer support.  All or nothing.  But alas they did not do that.  The shame of it all is that OpenID is a good idea.  Unfortunately, the message being sent is “don’t be a consumer”.  That’s the wrong message.  You should not have given the choice.

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Tags: aol, google, Identity, microsoft, openid, yahoo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.