Steven Osborn » Identity

SourceForge Ships OpenID!!

steve918 — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:03:10 +0000

SourceForge.net shipped support for OpenID this morning followed by an official announcement on their community forums. In just a few seconds I had my OpenID tied to my existing SF account. Their implementation seems very solid and straight forward.

This certainly makes them one of the largest, most prominent OpenID Relying parties to date.
I sure hope this leads to all of OSTG websites ( Slashdot, Thinkgeek, Freshmeat, etc…) following suit.

Their front page now advertises: 1,840,049 Users + 250,000,000 OpenIDs

Their OpenID management screen is really hot; It allows you to add additional OpenIDs to your account, decide which one you want to make public (if any) and choose one to delegate your SourceForge.net endpoint to. So developers can use http://sourceforge.net/users/username as their OpenID endpoint.

Digg It!

SourceForge OpenID RP in the works.

steve918 — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:50:23 +0000

Luke Crouch, one of SourceForge’s developers left a subtle message today in their community forums hinting at what OpenID features they’ve been working on recently.

It looks like they will be shipping a full on RP implementation along with delegation support for their developer profile pages.

“dedicated Identity Providers can focus on delivering comprehensive digital online identity services for web users, while we need to focus on those users’ needs as OSS community participants.” — Luke Crouch

I’m really excited to see SF leading the pack in the OpenID world. Their RP offerings will certainly be a valuable contribution to the community.

OpenID Personas = Cruft

steve918 — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:30:39 +0000

I use personas in the same way I think most people are using them in OpenID today. I don’t think of them as identity containers, but as address bundles. I have one very creatively labeled “Work” and another labeled “Home”. Hmm…. That sounds exactly like how I manage my identity in my address book except now the UI is more complex and spread out all over the place.

It seems to me that a good deal of OpenID providers today have translated multiple user accounts and/or online identities into OpenID “personas”. Which is essentially an attempt at replicating our mental picture of the semantic web. For users the web consists of many user-names for many websites; the correlation is typically one to one. The OpenID model draws a different picture where your authentication is now a one to many relationship which is why these methodologies don’t mesh well.

The point is with very few exceptions (mental case) we are all individuals with one personality or persona who happen to have multiple sets of data that describe us. The concept of personas only serves to confuse users in a failing attempt to replicate previous models.

This is how I want to manage my identity online: Easy and familiar.