Technorati has announced support for OpenID, finally giving it some much needed credibility. OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It provides one URL you can use to identify yourself at all participating sites around the web.
"The movement to spread Open ID aims to make our lives easier, our data more secure and help users avoid closed silos from big vendors throwing their weight around unfairly. Ongoing and meaningful support for the standard by Technorati is a big deal. Add this to the body of forward looking work, like microformats, that’s going on at Technorati."
There's even a prize of $5,000 to be awarded to the first 10 Open-Source projects that enable OpenID: http://iwantmyopenid.org/bounty
It's likely that more and more sites will be supporting OpenID in the near future. This might be an interesting add-on.
Also, here is a brief "technical" description of OpenID from the OpenID website:
-------------- OpenID is a decentralized identity system, but one that's actually decentralized and doesn't entirely crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business.
An OpenID identity is just a URL. You can have multiple identities in the same way you can have multiple URLs. All OpenID does is provide a way to prove that you own a URL (identity). And it does this without passing around your password, your email address, or anything you don't want it to. There's no profile exchange component at all: your profiile is your identity URL, but recipients of your identity can then learn more about you from any public, semantically interesting documents linked thereunder (FOAF, RSS, Atom, vCARD, etc.).
Anybody can run their own site using OpenID, and anybody can be an OpenID server, and they all work with each other without having to register with or pay anybody to "get started". An owner of a URL can pick which OpenID server to use.
While nothing in the protocol requires JavaScript or modern browsers, the authentication scheme plays nicely with "AJAX"-style setups, so you can prove your identity to a site without bouncing between pages. -------------
Example: Zoomr.com uses http://www.myopenid.com as it's OpenID server. You can log in just by typing in your OpenID url.
Mark, I'm not sure it's a feature that everyone wants, but it sounds like you could claim the $5000 bounty (by Jan '07, apparently) by including it as an add-on in the core release (to satisfy the requirements of the bounty).
I think the negative mention is for me lol (I didn't have much time, and was working on the packer, sorry Drew :-( ) Mark got the positive one.
I will be quite busy till the end of the month, then I will have one week before going to Italie for 2 weeks. So I won't have time to work with that before before june. I hope it will be done before
ouch!!! (...) I think that i've already made something that would gently slide into this!!!! It also reminded me of a couple of core problems with vanilla!!!! geese.... why didn't i think of this earlier?
I still have to work on the UI, the password reminder page and allow user attach and detach openIDs on the account page. I also need to allow other extension to work with it. But I don't think will work on it this week though.
That's just a prototype. There is still lot of work. I might have some time for it in January. If someone wants to work on in the meantime, he can join the vanilla-friends project on google code http://code.google.com/p/vanilla-friends/