OpenID: Probably the Most Logical Example of Web 3.0

While OpenID is not particularly new, the broad-base support for it is. So far, Yahoo offers support for it and now Blogger has enabled OpenID to place comments. Wordpress had support for it a ways back.

Now I should comment on what I mean by support. In some cases "support" means you can use an organization's ID to access other services. In other cases, as in blogger, you can use another institution's OpenID to get in. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. . .

What Does OpenID Do?

Many of you have already commented on how difficult it was to manage all the usernames and passwords for these Web 2.0 services. OpenID is a way to use one login for all your services.

How Does It Work?

First, you establish an OpenID account with a service. In Wordpress, you can do this by going to you Dashboard, hitting options and choosing OpenID. The page there will show your OpenID code (usually the URL of your blog) and the sites that you gave permission to access your account.

From there, all you have to do is login to your account at Wordpress. After that, any site that lets you use OpenID (eg. Blogger) will be able to accept your login to Wordpress as showing you are legit. For instance, I left a comment on the Web 3.0 post (mistakenly mentioning OpenURL, which is something completely different by the way -- I get mixed up over this stuff) by choosing OpenID as a login option, selecting Wordpress and entering my openID "identity provider."

Blogger then sends me to Wordpress.com who asks me if I really want to give permission to Blogger to use my login to authenticate me. I say "yes" and now I can enter Blogger comments all I want with my OpenID. I can remove permission as well, by going back to the Wordpress "options" and clicking them off.

Firefox 3.0 (the next release of Firefox) has openID as a high priority item as well. This may mean even easier access to openID in the future.

Why is this Web 3.0?

As I mentioned before, as Web 2.0 was a fragmenting of the web, Web 3.0 is a re-consolidation. Being able to access many separate services with a single passcode definitely brings people closer to making the internet anticipate our needs based on context than ever before.

In the end, of course, it's just a great way of keeping track of all those usernames that collect over time.

I should also add that OpenID support is still very new. Yahoo! says their version is in "Beta" mode (that means it's at the stage where they are testing it). But if you are interested in new things, see if you can give it a shot!