Whats in an ID ?
One obvious problem with having so many identities is that you have to remember their passwords and other credentials (unless you have the habit of using the same user ids and passwords everywhere – which is another problem altogether). The next ‘not so obvious’ problem is that of keeping your information current. When you move, or when you start using a new email address, would you like to log on to each of these accounts and update information? The third aspect is the time that you have to spend to register on every new website with which you have some business to do with – may be to buy something, may be to join on a discussion about a product that you have or may be to network with people. Not sure if you would share the same experience – I have decided not to interact with some sites only because of the pain of creating a new user profile. Having thought about the problems of having so many profiles for a person, I begin to wonder – doesn’t this problem exist in the real, physical world? Certainly it does. You fill out a different form to join each of the loyalty programs, to open each bank account and so on. But then everything online should be slightly better (at least) than the physical world –that is what I believe in. From the way things are evolving, looks like we are getting better at this.
Today, there exists a movement called openID (http://www.openid.net) which aims to clean up online identity management. Before explaining the concept, let me tell you who all has signed up. Google®, Yahoo!®, Facebook®, AOL®, Microsoft®, Verisign® and Sun® are some of the prominent members –this list should tell you a bit about the acceptability of this idea. This movement started as early as 2005, but it is only now that the big players are taking notice. Let me explain the idea - openID is an online identity which will have an associated password. There will be a set of websites called as openID providers who will be issuing these identities. Google® and Yahoo® are good examples. There will be a set of websites which allows users to use their existing openIDs without having to register and create profiles separately. Such websites are known as openID accepting sites. An important aspect is that the accepting websites never get to see the openID credentials that are used. They would want to know the user id (so that they can use the same to identify the customer in the future as well). They can also request for other information – like name, address, etc to be shared by the openID provider. There is no standard set of information (yet) that you can expect from an open id provider that is still evolving. For example, Google would only share name and email while AOL shares date of birth in addition. So the single openID ends up being your unique online identifier.
Want to see this working? That is easy to do. I will show what happens when an openID holder (most of you would be one) visits an openID accepting website. I will be using my Gmail id as the openID and the accepting site is the MySears community website. I start by visiting the login page - https://www.mysears.com/login
In the login page, you have the usual login form. In addition you can see some options on the right side. Shown there are some of the most popular id providers. If you have a user id at any of these sites, you do not have to register! You can just click on any of them. In our example, I choose to click on the Google® icon.
I am taken to the Google website and the familiar Google login form is displayed. However, there is a message on the page which tells that MySears is asking to share some information. Since I did this on purpose, I provide gmail credentials. Please note that MySears does not get to see my password.
