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Mar 13

Taking ownership of OpenID

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Clickpass

Peter Nixey is a good bloke that I met at a conference way back. At the time he showed me a killer CMS product that was nice and Ajax-y, and most of all usable enough for my mother.

Now he is in the news with his Y Combinator startup Clickpass and how it is trying to make OpenID more usable.

I decided to give it a roll, and switched out my delegated open id to:

<link rel="openid.server" href="https://www.clickpass.com/openid_server">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://clickpass.com/public/dalmaer">

When OpenID providers first started to come out of the woodwork it felt like deja vu. Of IM providers. Of email. Of blogs.

I am in a situation these days where I want to own the end point, but have the service outsourced. almaer.com forever. I didn’t want to be switching from myopenid.com/dion to youropenid.com/dion and hoping to be able to bridge the accounts. I want to use almaer.com as my rel=”me”. As soon as delegation came about, I was able to do that and life is happy.

I am looking forward to seeing Peter, and others, crack the nut on cool openid features, and also doing enough to allow Simon to not say “we are no worse than before” and be able to say “we are way better than before”.

5 Responses to “Taking ownership of OpenID”

  1. Tony Says:

    For me ownership of the end point and outsourced service was the answer to many of the questions that arose in the SXSW panel, and yet no one actually advocated this with one panelist encouraging people not to do so.

    OpenID is irrevocably linked to the wider concept of ones personal identity online, and until openid providers realise that users should be able to have a personal portable end point that they own, I think we will miss the true potential of this awesome service.

  2. Craig Overend Says:

    When I first tried Clickpass, I was able to log into an OpenID based site as someone else. Apparently not a Clickpass problem but this is the second time it’s happened to me using OpenID. How many other people have logged into sites as me?

    I call this “Taking ownership of other peoples OpenID.” :)

  3. dion Says:

    Tony,

    Do you use delegation and take ownership? Do you have a preferred provider right now?

  4. dion Says:

    Craig,

    Wow. When you entered someone elses URL, how did you then get through as them? Were you not sent over to their provider and asked to login?

  5. Peter Nixey Says:

    Hi Dion,

    It’s been far too long since we last met – looking forward to catching up! Thanks for the kind comments, very glad you enjoyed the service. We’ll make sure we get it out in more places and we’ve got some great features that are coming soon. Watch this space…

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