OpenID
OpenID is a distributed identification mechanism that I’ve been thinking about using on this site. Essentially, once you had a profile set up, each OpenID site (”consumer”) you visited would just require you to enter your OpenID URL. You would get forwarded to your “provider”, who would ask you if/how you want to allow the consumer to read your info. Once that’s settled, any future visits to the consumer would only require you to enter your URL. Repeat for many different sites, and the effect is you have a centralized profile and all you have to give to log in to consumer sites is your URL.
Finding the documentation from an OpenID consumer’s point of view lacking, I asked Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain (who develops and promotes OpenID) a few questions and he responded in a blog post.
I believe I’m going to look further into OpenID. One of the major problems that userstyles.org has is that not enough people are commenting on or rating styles (which in turns affects another major problem: fewer comments means fewer style authors feel as appreciated as they should be, and post fewer styles). OpenID would make people more likely to comment.
October 8th, 2006 at 9:05 pm
that openid thing seems very interesting [if not slightly confusing between consumers and users ...]
it sounds a bit like net passport but without the strip search involved
the only thing i wondered was where is the money in it ?
do webmasters get charged or only the ‘big’ players ?
October 8th, 2006 at 9:36 pm
I presume the money goes to the providers. They could show ads to the users (one ad per login = a lot of ads) or by giving the users of certain consumers special treatment in exchange for money.
But as far as I can tell, right now there’s no major money being moved around because the technology is still in its infancy.