Comments on: Google launches limited API support for OpenID

Google joins the OpenID fray with its own solution, which lets developers integrate a universal log-in for their users to sign on with their Google account.

[daveman692]

Google is taking advantage of a feature in OpenID 2.0 known as "Directed Identity". This allows an OpenID 2.0 Relying Party to start the OpenID protocol flow using a known URL (Yahoo!'s is http://openid.yahoo.com/) to allow for "one click" style login dialogues. By performing discovery on this URL, using the XRDS XML format, the OpenID Provider advertises the OpenID Endpoint URL for the Relying Party to make a request against. Google is doing this correctly with the URL to perform discovery against being https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id.

The piece that Google is currently doing differently is requiring pre-registration of each OpenID Relying Party before users can login to a given site. This does break the common deployment of OpenID on the web today, but Eric Sachs of Google has said on the OpenID mailing list (http://tinyurl.com/562mec) that this is temporary as they work to stabilize their OpenID Provider: "We just need to do the standard scaling, stability, translation quality, etc. evaluation to make sure there are no major problems. If we are lucky, that won't take much time. However it is more then likely that we will need to tweak things in our user interface to make it easier to understand, and unfortunately translating any such tweaks into 40+ languages takes awhile."

As for using email addresses as OpenIDs, this is something the OpenID community is talking about quite a bit right now; Google included.

By the way, when will I be able to comment on Webware using my OpenID? :P

[paulmwatson]

I thought the Windows Live ID OpenID support required that you have a Windows Live ID. So you have to register with Windows Live ID and then you can generate an OpenID identity with your Windows Live ID. It is also "just" an OpenID provider, not a consumer.

[bkkissel]

This is a great development for OpenID, and more importantly for the websites and end users that can benefit from faster and easier registrations and logins using existing accounts with Google, Yahoo, AOL, and many other OpenID providers.

JanRain's RPX (http://www.janrain.com/products/rpx) OpenID website enabling service has already integrated and deployed support for Google's OpenID service. You can see a demo at www.velog.com.

You can also see some case studies of successful OpenID deployments with measurable benefits at: http://www.janrain.com/openid/casestudies