Michael Arrington wrote “Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?” on TechCrunch on the 24th March 2008
If you’ll excuse the pun, the crunch here appears to be that the initial Big Four Internet companies are not acting as “relying parties”. My next question is, “Do they need to be relying parties?”
Do they need to be? Obvious not, but many people in the community would like see them as relying parties; AOL are, in fact, allowing OpenID URLs issued by other OpenID servers to be accepted by white list.
I don’t think the other companies at this stage want to be “relying parties” forever. OpenID, as a technology, represents uncharted waters with some fair degree of risk regarding poor implementation. I recently managed to grab a conversation with Bob Blakley from the Burton Group, because I read his blog concerning “OpenID weaknesses”
From my conversation with Bob, my personal belief is that the all the Big Companies will become “relying parties” in time, and OpenID will have to go down a certification route, and here is the way I see it at this moment.
Tier1
Government issued with two-factor/hardware tokens
Tier2
Mobiles and Banks, two-factor/hardware tokens
Tier3
Individually certified OpenID servers which don’t use two-factor/hardware tokens
EG Media owners, ISPs, Brand owners
Tier4
Certified OpenID servers that don’t use two-factor/hardware tokens, but are based on FOSS software, where a release can have security testing claims made against it at the time of certification. EG WordPress v3.0 or Drupal v6.1 etc
Tier5
Not certified
Certification in this manner would allow the Big Companies to become “relying parties” quickly by submitting OpenID servers, which are certified to their white lists, like AOL are doing presently.
So from my point of view, the Big companies will become “relying parties”, but it is going to take some time. Hold tight folks!
OpenID will take off because:
OpenID allows media owners to moneterise their readership. I bet that less than 1% of users register to create a profile for an online newspaper. OpenID reduces the friction to create a profile on a site to near zero. Imagine there comes a time that if you don’t use your OpenID URL to log in, you will only be able to read the basic headlines? Logging into a rich content site, like an online newspaper, enables online advertising to be customised for the user – based on their known browsing habits without the identity of the user needing to be known.
I surmise that 80% of users will choose to use the OpenID server from their Tier3/4/5 provider when they are interacting with an online newspaper or an individual’s lone blog. So the number of OpenID “relying parties” that will accept OpenID URLs at this stage is paramount, and given that media owners have everything to gain by allowing Tier3/4/5 providers OpenID URL to log in, surely this aspect of relying parties is what really matters and will come reasonably quickly.
Question:
How will brokers put a value on OpenID user profiles that are built up on “relying parties’” data? (Without breaking privacy laws – nobody will want a Phorm storm on their hands, perceived or real – the true or facts never matter.)
Thoughts:
Media companies that are OpenID servers, “relying parties” and have their own advertising engines will be valuable because of the data they hold on users who browse their content who have logged in with an OpenID URL. And the more companies they acquire with similar data sets, the more the data value will increase according to Metcalfe’s law. Why? Because they as they buy up media property, they can see the interests of individuals over many OpenID “relying parties”.
Unless you use Google as a logged in user, Google can only track usage by browser, not by user.
For Google to compete against the New Media companies, they must start acquiring content providers, or the New Media companies will club together to create new Yahoo! directories and search style Internet resources based on user’s actual surfing habits, as opposed to inbound links ranking algorithms that are constantly being manipulated.
The good news is that media owners, both large and very small, will benefit financially. Is content King?
Tags: advertising, content, google, media owners, OpenID
