What is this OpenID thing?
So what, you may be wondering, is this OpenID thing, anyway?
Leaving aside all the marketing-talk polish, OpenID is a bit of code on my site plus a bit of code on a whole lot of other sites. What all that code says is that you only need a sign-in with one of us; everyone else who participates agrees to accept that identity.
So, let’s say you have an account with LiveJournal (or Flickr or whomever). LJ participates in OpenID, so when you come here you can comment using only the identifier username.livejournal.com in the URL field.
My site contacts the LJ server and asks “does Username have an account with you?” and, if you are logged in there, the LJ server loads a page that asks you “Do you want me to talk to this site?” and you get to select Yes Once, Yes Always, or No Never. If you select Yes, the LJ server sends a message back saying “yep, she’s with us”. At which point my site says “great, I know who you are”.
If you pick Yes Once, you will be asked to reconfirm that you want LJ to talk to my site each time you comment or sign in here. If you pick Yes Always, you only have to confirm it once. And if you are not logged in with LJ at the time you invoke OpenID here, you will see an LJ page saying “Who are you? Log in!” and will have to return here to do it again so that the loop goes through.
The least hassle is to select Yes Always. Then you’ll only ever have to confirm that first time.
Most OpenID providers now support sreg, which means that your confirmed email will also be supplied, if a site asks for it. Mine does, in order to let you receive comment replies. If your provider does not support sreg, my site will, in fact, pop up a box asking you to please input an email. This email is as secure as anything gets on the web and will never be disclosed, even in the comment reply notifications.
Your password and other private information is never passed to my site–only the confirmation that your account on LJ or wherever exists and is active.
So your OpenID identity (or login) is simply the web address of your main account–whichever one you’ve decided to use and stay logged in to most of the time. The whole thing is simply a shortcut, so you don’t have to re-enter a username and password or email a gajillion times across the web. Instead you just have to enter the url of that one account.
OpenID is an add-on. Any site can use the bit of code that goes and asks other sites whether UsernameWhoever exists. Not all sites accept OpenID log-ins, and not all social-networking/journaling sites will provide the “yes, Username is from here” confirmation. But, among the sites that do, it can make life a bit quicker and easier.
Some sites that participate:
- LiveJournal and sites based on the LJ code, such as InsaneJournal. (It is worth noting that the founder of LJ is the founder of OpenID; fortunately, OpenID is less susceptible to being bought by ham-handed venture capitalists.)
- WordPress.com (and, as you can see, there are plugins to add it to any personal installation of the WordPress code)
- Flickr (though Yahoo in general does not)
Some sites that do not:
- Myspace
- Blogger
Important! LJ users whose names include underscores (eg _branch_) need to use a different shape of url than usual. Your log-in will look like users.livejournal.com/_username_. This is because browsers cannot understand subdomains that start with an underscore.
