OpenID

Scott Hanselman had nice talk on OpenID recently. OpenID is the next generation of light-weight identity services on the web - one username, one password for all the sites you go to on the web. After listening to the show I headed over to www.myopenid.com (the OpenID provider atm) and created my very own account: http://solberg.myopenid.com/. Then I had to add a couple of lines to my blog to tell OpenID enabled sites I log into which OpenID server I use and my delegate:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server">
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://solberg.myopenid.com/">

The registration process was very easy and I even got the chance to register on a couple of sites. The process goes something like this:

1. Enter the URL for your OpenID enabled site, / in my case.
2. You're then redirected to MyOpenID that identifies you and asks for your permission to send specific data about you back to the site, usually at least your e-mail address and name.
3. You can the allow once, allow always or deny permission and if you permit your in :-)

At MyOpenID you can also view the places you've been to and remove permanent permissions etc. Really simple.

There are a few .NET libraries out there. I guess I'll wait a bit until they've matured a bit, hopefully an OpenID HTTP module will see the daylight in near future! OpenID enabling sites should be really easy though, not even Javascript is required.