How to get started with OpenID
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If you are like me, every time you need to log in to a web service that you haven’t been using for a while you go through a routine of trying out a few different user name and password combinations. When you get tired of trying, you click on the “forgot your password?” link and get the password sent to you by e-mail.
It’s not fun. It’s actually rather annoying.
OpenID brings us a solution to this problem by providing a unique identity that you can use to login to any web service that supports the technology. OpenID is an open standard and anyone - even you and I - can provide the authentication service. This way when using OpenID you are not tying yourself to any single company.
Here’s how to use it:
Logging in with OpenID couldn’t be easier
One of the earliest adopters of OpenID is 37signals with their product line consisting of such products as Backpack, Basecamp and Highrise. That’s why I’m using their tool, Backpack, as an example for showing you how to sign in using OpenID.
At first, when I arrive on my Backpack login page I see the regular login box with a user name and password. After all, most people still aren’t using OpenID so it doesn’t make sense to make their experience any worse by changing the familiar layout too dramatically. But if you look closely enough, you notice that there is a small link saying “Login with an OpenID”. I click on that and all of the sudden the form changes:
Now there is only one field, meant for inputting my OpenID. All I need to do is to type it in and let my OpenID provider handle the rest.
If I would have already been logged in at my OpenID provider’s web site, it would just have let Backpack know that I am who I claim to be and that would have been it. This time however I wasn’t logged in yet, so I need to type in my claimID login information. When that’s done, I’m directed to my Backpack account.
The nice part here is that this is the only login information I need to remember for any of the web sites using OpenID as their login method.
In Backpack you see that because both Highrise and Backpack use OpenID as their login method and know my OpenID, logging into one of them logs me automatically to the other as well.
That’s the beauty of having a unified login functionality.
How to get your own OpenID
To join the fun you need to have an OpenID.
Luckily getting one is really straightforward: just choose one of the available OpenID providers and sign up to their service. I chose ClaimID but there are lots of other options as well:
Once you have signed up for an OpenID you probably want to make it look more like yours.
My original OpenID from ClaimID.com was http://openid.claimid.com/jarkkolaine. It’s okay, but not that nice. After all openid.claimid.com doesn’t really tell anything about me. It just advertises the ClaimID service.
So, what I did was that I added the following two lines of HTML code to my WordPress header template (just after the <head> tag):
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://openid.claimid.com/server” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://openid.claimid.com/jarkkolaine” />
And the result?
Now I can use my blog address as my OpenID: http://jarkkolaine.com tells really well who I am, and when people see it they’ll also want to go and check out my blog.
Where to use your OpenID
The number of sites enabled with OpenID keeps growing, but it’s not huge yet.
As I mentioned in the beginning of this post, 37signals has been an early adopter and all of their products are OpenID enabled. In addition to them, here are a few links you might want to check out. If you know of more good sites that support OpenID, please add a comment to the article so that other readers will also benefit from the information.
- Zooomr.com photo sharing
- LiveJournal
- Some WordPress blogs (I need to get this plugin installed as well)
- Hampr online bookmarks
- DZone (Digg for developers), although I’m still having some trouble logging in with my OpenID
- mag.nolia.com link sharing
- Jyte
- Iconbuffet
The future? It’s up to us to decide
It’s up to us to decide whether this new technology will break through or not. As users we can start creating our own OpenIDs and requesting our web services to add support for them. As developers we can be on the cutting edge by supporting OpenID and promoting it to the public. Or if we don’t want to use a technology like this we can just not worry about it and let the idea be forgotten.
What do you think? Do you want to have an OpenID enabled future, or is it just something that will come and go - like the previous attempts for creating one login method to be used everywhere?
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August 2nd, 2007 at 8:43 am
What’s to keep us anonymous and our habits private? Some marketing & trolling bots would already like to link our activities from one site with those on another. That’s the big downside I can think of. Otherwise quite cool!
August 2nd, 2007 at 8:53 am
That’s a good point, John!
For me however that isn’t a problem, because I don’t consider my online habits private anyway. Whenever I log to a new site, I usually use the same username (and often the same password too - shame on me…) as on other sites. I also post my real name everywhere so I guess I don’t have any privacy left online anymore.
But that’s just me. How about the rest of you? Do you want to keep your surfing habits private or are you like me and don’t care about privacy that much?
August 6th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
FWIW, and this is very much an opinionated thing, but 37Signals was (from my perspective) very late to the game.
They only rolled out support this year, while I’ve been using my OpenID for at least a year (if not a bit longer?) now.
In the grand scheme of the number of consumers, yes, 37 Signals will down the road be “among the earliest” of adopters. Not to mention definitely one of the first handfuls of major name adopters (Behind LiveJournal, AOL, VeriSign, Sun and probably a few more notables I’m forgetting).
Other than that, good write-up. I thoroughly enjoy reading about any form of support and documentation/detail written to excite and inform visitors.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Jason, good point!
I have to admit that although I had heard some mentions about OpenID before, I saw OpenID in action in the 37signals apps and have missed the earlier implementations.
Just to feed my curiosity, would you happen to remember what were the first sites using OpenID? And where are you using yours currently? :) It would be great to find more places where to use it…
August 7th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Well. LiveJournal founder Brad Fitzpatrick was the initial creator of OpenID, and once it caught on, the other folks (VeriSign, JanRain, etc.) put their two cents forth and continue to do so.
So the obvious answer is that LiveJournal supported it first, with the initial proof-of-concept existing on Danga.com (Brad’s company he founded for LiveJournal, IIRC).
So, LiveJournal (I don’t use DeadJournal, GreatestJournal, etc. so I wouldn’t know if/when they came along), Danga, and LifeWiki (the original home of the OpenID wiki) were the first sites to support the auth scheme.
I do believe that JanRain jumped in very quickly, and OpenID-ified their “Schtuff” wiki service (which they have since sold to another party), not to mention myOpenID came about very very quickly, probably came out before Schtuff was a consumer.
Zooomr implemented OpenID into Mark 2 rather quickly, I was a little late to that game, and it’s just ramped up from there. VOX, TypePad, MT4, WP Plugins, etc.
Those are the first definitive locations I’m personally aware of.
I would use mine at LiveJournal if I didn’t have an account already :P. I’m hoping they allow an external OpenID login method soon (so I can login using my LiveJournal account, or via a designated external OpenID).
I’m using it on Zooomr, Jyte, Pibb, various blogs, ClaimID and ma.gnolia. And that’s just regularily. And I’ve been eye-balling Plaxo (I’ll have to see how it compares to vIdentity. Might be Apples and Oranges, I just haven’t had a chance to check it out yet), and ToodleDo.
August 7th, 2007 at 10:45 pm
Thanks for the information, Jason! I’ll check out the site’s you mentioned - and keep hoping that more and more services would move to OpenID.
December 30th, 2007 at 11:13 am
All the images are gone! What happened?
January 3rd, 2008 at 8:08 pm
Crap… They must have been lost in the dramatic blogging accident I had back in summer.
Thanks for noticing! I’ll try to get them back soon :)