Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a OpenID
OpenID is ‘an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity’.
That doesn’t sound terribly exciting, but it has the potential to change the way we all use websites, particularly those that require you to login, or prove in some way that you are who you say you are.
At the moment, maintaining an identity on all the websites you visit is tricky—at each one, you have to go to all the bother of signing up, cross your fingers that someone hasn’t taken your preferred username, and think up a memorable-but-secure password—with OpenID, you maintain a single identity, expressed in the form of a URL, and can use it to log in to any OpenID-enable site you come across. In other words, OpenID turns the concept of having an account at a given website on its head, letting users be themselves all over the web. One URL, one password: simple.
As well as working as a web-wide login, OpenID also makes it possible for people to keep information about themselves in one place, instead of scattered across personal websites, social networking profiles, MySpace pages and all the rest. And if your information changes, it can be changed once, in one place, and the change is instantly reflected across every site where you’ve logged in using OpenID.
If you have a domain of your own, and are happy to do a bit of tinkering you can make that your OpenID identity1; if you don’t, you can sign up with a number of free services, like MyOpenID (here’s mine).
At the moment, only a limited number of sites are using OpenID—mostly wikis and weblogs—but, with millions of LiveJournal folk able to use their journal URL as an OpenID identity, and popular sites like Zooomr, Ma.gnolia and Technorati adding support every day, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a commonplace, if not standard, way of managing an identity online.
With all that in mind, I’ve added OpenID support to Submit Response—if you have an identity, you can sign your comments here with it, and everyone will know for sure that you are you.
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I actually find this faintly disturbing—in a sense, now I am submitresponse.co.uk/weblog/. (I plan to change this to the currently unused jackmottram.com soon).↩
This is a little demonstration comment—as you can see, when I sign in with OpenID, a logo appears next to my name to let people know Iââ¬â¢ve done so.
Posted by Jack at 1pm on 23.01.07
Surely you’d rather be jackmottram.net ?
Posted by c0NZ at 3pm on 23.01.07
…or .org, but I have .com and .co.uk already, so that’s probably enough to be going along with.
I guess the ideal TLD for this stuff is .name (or maybe even .info), as in jack.mottram.name, but that seems a bit naff for some reason, and it makes it look like your surname is ‘name’.
Posted by Jack at 4pm on 23.01.07
my sister is an addict on Slot Machines, she always play any kind of game on the slot machine ;-*
Posted by Pine Cupboard at 11am on 03.12.10