OpenID and Googlepedia

Googlepedia is a Firefox extension that combines google search results with wikipedia pages for that specific search item. How does it do that? It creates a second windowpane on the right(of your google result page), that contains the wikipedia article for your search string. And if you navigate the Wikipedia links, it will take those links and google search them for you. If it gets in your way, you can hide it. I've found it quite useful as I'm often switching between the two sites.

I've been starting to see OpenID login options on several websites, and always wondered what it was. So I thought I'd try it out. But first, what is it? It's an easier way to login without the pain of having to remember multiple usernames and passwords. It's also decentralized and free.

Let's say you have a Yahoo account, and you want to post a comment on Blogger(google's site). By default only people with google accounts can post, or the blog owner has the choice of opening up comments to anyone, which is just asking for spam trouble.

Enter OpenID. Instead of having to create a new Google account, you enter your OpenID, which is a URL(that you sign up for at the OpenID provider) that then takes you back to login to your yahoo account, asks you if you want to login to the new site, and then proceeds. One important distinction here is that you can tell the openID provider site to remember that you've ok'd a certain site, so it doesn't keep prompting you.

And then you're authenticated to the blogger site and can post your comment. It is all done over SSL, so it's encrypted, and your password is not sent between the two sites, only an authentication token. Clever aye?

Or, let's say you have a sourceforge account, with a unique username and password, that you can never remember. Use their new OpenID login instead. The first time you use it, you'll need to login to the actual Sourceforge account, using your username and password(to link the two), but after that you can always just login with the URL(which again, if you're not logged into your openID provider, will prompt you to login.

So how do you get an OpenID? From an OpenID provider, or if you have your own server, you can become your own OpenID provider. If you have a google account, then you already have an OpenID, it's the URL of your blog site, although you'll need to use the beta draft.blogspot.com as your dashboard to enable it for your blog. Yahoo's openID site is openid.yahoo.com. For theirs, you go through a couple of steps to create one, but you can make it custom one(ie. me.yahoo.com/whateveryouwant_here_that's_not_already_taken) I only mention these two cause I have accounts with them. Here's a more complete list of OpenID providers:
http://openid.net/get/

So OpenID is a great idea, but it's just starting to catch on. Some people argue that the password manager within a browser already does what OpenID is attempting to do(ie. save people from having to remember lots of different passwords). That's true, but OpenID works if you're away from your usual computer, and don't have your saved passwords handy. It also doesn't stop blog spammers, just slows them down.

I believe the idea will catch on, as more and more websites start using it. The extent to which one site will trust another, especially competitor's openId provider will likely, and sadly always be limited. A nice exception here is sourceforge, although it's limited to which openID providers it will accept(it appears anyway)

As a final note, Drupal (popular CMS application) now has support for OpenID logins, and the OpenID project is offering a $5000 bounty to other projects that implement it. Nice.
-T