You’ve probably already heard of OpenID. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a new and upcoming standard for user authentication (and fellow Gizbuzz blogger Huw gave a nice introduction here).
I personally think OpenID is a great idea, and I’m a proponent of the idea and the standard. For a web development project I’m working on at the moment, we’re going to be using OpenID as the sole authentication system for users. That is to say, you will need an OpenID to actually sign up for the service and it will be the single system controlling your sign in.
There’s a problem though. The average computer user has never heard of OpenID, doesn’t really understand it and might be turned away from using this new service if they don’t very quickly ‘get’ how to sign up. We could have just shunned OpenID, built another proprietary username/password system and be done with it.
As a web service provider, though, I feel we have a responsibility to be pushing for new standards and helping spread OpenID. After all, it’s only through the widespread adoption of standards that the web is what it is today.
So we want to push OpenID and bring it to the forefront. What do we need to do?
