OpenID – Using your own domain as your OpenID, without hosting a OpenID Server

April 18, 2008

If you haven’t heard about OpenID yet, you will. It is an identity federation concept like Passport was meant to be, but it is an open specification, not an implementation. Therefore anyone is free to create and manage an OpenID service and provide OpenID’s. The idea is that if you get an OpenID from some provider, it doesn’t really matter, and the any web application (or windows application for that matter) that supports OpenID can accept your OpenId credentials instead of username / password specific to that application. Eventually it will reduce the number of places you have to maintain credentials. Coupled with Information Cards, it could be a really great thing. We will probably try to support it in our tools soon. This also provides a link to a comparison of various OpenID providers.