Making money with OpenID

Johannes Ernst makes a few good points about how Yahoo!’s jump into OpenID makes OpenID a viable business.

One of the pain points with OpenID is that it’s quite hard to implement it as a customer. If you’re a small business with a home-grown web site, it’s a daunting task, despite excellent write-ups and a number of excellent software components.

Mom and Pop needs a simpler way of adding OpenID to their site. An identity proxy service that takes care of all OpenID magic with a simple API that customers hand the received the OpenID identifier to and get the equivalence of a yes/no back from the API?

I think the browser redirects, return addresses and trust roots (realms) could be properly handled as per the protocol.

Hmmm….. Anyone interested? ;)

Comments

[Gary Krall]

Personally I see this as a "solution looking for a problem". It seems to me that the challenge for OpenID adoption has always been to be more of an issue of large site/scale adoption than making it easier for "mom and pop" websites to integrate.

There already are too many sites and if anything I think users are trying to cut down on the number of destinations they visit. I mean how many "mom & pop" websites do you login to or for that matter care to login to? Do you want to fill in "yet another" registration form?!

Most "mom & pop" websites tend to use cms systems many of which have openid plugins already integrated. Plus the problem is that "mom & pop" still end up having to map openids to site ids, which is majority of the problem in the first place.