OpenID

You can use your Google Account to log into any site that supports OpenID!

But can you log into Google with another site's OpenID?

Here are my thoughts. Spammers can create OpenIDs too, and a single sign-on system might be many a spammer's wet dream. It gives them easy access to millions of sites in one fell swoop.

Yahoo! is jumping on the OpenID wagon and is making it possible to use your Yahoo! account as a valid OpenID. That's another quarter of a billion OpenIDs out there! Put that together with the fact that AOL made their AIM logins work as OpenIDs as well and most everyone in the US at least will already have an OpenID.

After one year of development we are ready to release Drupal 6.0 to the world. Thanks to the tireless work of the Drupal community, over 1,600 issues have been resolved during the Drupal 6.0 release cycle. These changes are evident in Drupal 6's major usability improvements, security and maintainability advancements, friendlier installer, and expanded development framework. Further, from bug fix to feature request, these issues follow-through on the Drupal project's continued commitment to deliver flexibility and power to themers and developers.

Some really neat features, like OpenID in core, actions and triggers, easier and more powerful theming, batch API and command line control. Nifty! Maybe I'll play with it next week and see how image.module is doing.

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building.

So, we now have Google's answer to Facebook's closed development platform: OpenSocial (link goes live Thursday).

Google has a good selection of launch partners for this -- Ning, LinkedIn (an API?! finally!), and Plaxo being the most interesting ones. RockYou and Slide are Facebook development companies that are also signed on, so we'll definitely see some launch apps, not just bare APIs.

This is, of course, very encouraging and similar to the short discussion I lead at the Facebook Developer Garage: integrate with systems other than Facebook, use open standards, and put your stuff out on the open web. Marc Canter has a gleeful post about all of this, including linking back to standards and experiments that have already been underway. Be interesting to see how OpenID Attribute Exchange, which I have long been a fan of, fits into all this.

Previously, Microformats Applied To Various Social Networking Hubs.

To explain OpenID single sign on, we have two new screencasts for OpenID which has been included in Bryght Basic since July 31, 2007:

• Logging into a Drupal Site and Ma.gnolia using OpenID Screencast
• Associating an OpenID with your Drupal Account