OpenID, hCard and the future of single sign on.
When you compare the specs for OpenId and hCard, you might see two totally different things. OpenID is more like your state ID/driver license while hCard is like a business card (I suck at analogy). But they do share one common feature - an Open Standard.
Let me talk a little about OpenID. First, OpenID is not a trust system. You can’t build trust if you don’t have an identity. That’s what OpenID gives you - an identity. That’s also why analogically, it’s a state ID, not a master keycard that gives you access to all department doors (assuming you’re a CIA). Many social sites now support OpenID - livejournal.com, zooomr, Hampr, ma.gnolia, technorati and many more. It also has a wide range of code libraries that let you implement your own OpenID server and whatnots. Here’s how it works:
First, register an OpenID with one of the many free OpenID servers out there. I use myopenid.com. To associate your own site with the ID, instead of having to sign on using the default yourname.myopenid.com, add the following tags to the header of your web page.
Now i can sign in using alvinwoon.com, instead of alvin.woon.myopenid.com. Let’s say I’m trying to log into the openidenabled.com’s website.
If I have never log into this site using my OpenID before, my ID server will redirect me to this page.
It will also redirect me if I am not log into your OpenID server. On many site such as livejournal.com, you can check the ‘log in’ box before submitting comment. That will authenticate your ID while logging you in at the same time, as shown below.
After that you are signed in. Simple!
OpenID and microformats are things that you can take with you, anywhere around the web. As more and more sites support it, you can sign in using the exact same login information. You don’t have to be John on website #1, Johnny on website #2 and J. on website #3. With the growth of social relations on the web, these same sets of common data can, in time, build a network of semantic data and relationship-based trust that can be shared by many different sites and platforms. Everything is portable.
One of the many benefits of OpenID is the Simple Registration extension. Simple registration is an extension to the OpenID protocol that provides a way to pass common site registration data to consumer websites, allowing you to bypass the data-entry step of registration. This is where I believe hCard can play a role. This is my myopenid’s personas [image link] and this is my vcard/hCard [image link]. There are some very common information that can be shared.
With a simple ‘point us to your hcard’, we can share the information in between. This is just one of the many overlaps I can think of when it comes to the practice of Open Standards.
