Manish Jethani: Weblog » January 4th, 2007

Chris Messina has been making posts about OpenID, and I also read similar reports on O'Reilly Radar. Is 2007 going to be the year of OpenID?

I hope so. I've always found it funny how anyone can be impersonated so easily on the internet, be it email or blogs. Imagine when Bill Gates leaves a comment on a blog: who's going to believe it's him?

OpenID is an "open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity", a system under which users are identified by their URIs. For example, when I end up on an OpenID-enabled site, it asks me for my URI, which it then verifies with my identity provider. At the end of it, the site knows I am who I say I am.

I've been through the specs and also tried to implement a stateless Flash-based OpenID consumer (unsuccessfully). It's a very simple protocol, with implementations available in various languages already. Hopefully I'll find time to complete a pure client-side (either ActionScript or JavaScript) implementation sometime.