Valley Chai

after the initial pioneers, the big boys are flocking to OpenID initiative. yahoo!, google and others are jumping in head-first into this initiative that seemed to have AOL, SixApart, Verisign and co as the initial backers.

not since mybloglog have i seen a more promising and portable social web technology that frankly took me by surprise at it’s pace of adoption. readwrite web has a great primer on what it is about. it primarily is like the microsoft passport of late nineties, but is more of an open standard. it lets one company manage your authentication credentials and lets them use those credentials to login to any website. cool, eh? so you could login once and surf around the web, and every web site would know who you are, without you having to bare your soul to each one of them. i am a paranoid freak. this is huge.

so i decided to give it a spin on this blog. a quick web search for a wordpress openid plugin, a download and an unzip later, i was done. DONE! if you can get an openid with one of the providers (i got mine at Verisign), you can login to this blog with OpenID. and if you have this firefox plugin, it gets even easier.

as a product manager, i know how HUGELY painful it is to handle logged-in/logged-out states of users in creating web-based features, and such a simple service would make it easy to cut to the features in a jiffy, not to mention - it would probably make the logged-out states of users quite rare in the first place.

thinking a bit in the clouds, all that these openid providers need to do is to allow you to manage your contacts in one central place as well. and if yahoo and google already have your contacts in their email services, it will instantly make your social graph portable. gasp. and you don’t have to trust any and every random social networking website with your contacts.

no wonder the grand-old web pioneers are crashing this party. this threatens their existence, and it is a huge opportunity to boot.