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Microsoft supports OpenID
by Decius at 2:26 pm EST, Feb 6, 2007

Microsoft has joined forces with the Web 2.0 vanguard, as Bill Gates announced Tuesday in a keynote at the RSA security conference that Microsoft was going to support a distributed identity system known as OpenID.

This is interesting. OpenID has been discussed on MemeStreams before. While it would be useful for MemeStreams to serve OpenID so that our users could use their accounts to post on blogs that accept it, accepting it here is a different story. OpenID essentially allows anonymous blog commenters to maintain a persistent identity across the Internet. As we don't accept anonymous comments, adding this sort of capability presents more challenges for us than for blogs that do. We've talked about allowing anonymous comments, but this can open the door to more spam, particularly in threads that aren't fresh. It would be nice if a real identity sharing technology was layered on top of OpenID to ease account creation. There is a system that attempts to do this, but it suffers from the same scope limitations that FOAF does. Either way, I think we've got some simpler coding work that needs to be done on this site before that bubbles up to the top of our todo list.

Has anyone here messed with Cardspace?

RE: Microsoft supports OpenID
by dmv at 11:48 pm EST, Feb 6, 2007

Decius wrote:

This is interesting. OpenID has been discussed on MemeStreams before. While it would be useful for MemeStreams to serve OpenID so that our users could use their accounts to post on blogs that accept it, accepting it here is a different story.

At a minimum, users should be able to "claim" their memestream being able to add the two OpenID tags to the head of their stream:

The next logical step would be to install one of the server packages, so the user could set openid.server to a memestreams id and use the memestreams cookie.

It would be nice if a real identity sharing technology was layered on top of OpenID to ease account creation. There is a system that attempts to do this, but it suffers from the same scope limitations that FOAF does.

I'm on the mailing list, and yes, there is a very strong desire to have these additional layers. However, the principle people involved argue -- effectively and probably wisely -- that for OpenID to be able to do that, it needs to be widely adopted. For that to happen, it has to be easy, low impact and low risk. As a basic decentralized id system, in the 2.0 spec, it accomplishes that. They've also got a very nice attribute exchange protocol. But anything passed that gets put off until broad adoption. All too familiar with the failures of previous attempts. This wisdom is why they've managed to get buy in from Sxip and Microsoft.