March 7th, 2011

Hey Facebook, Your Code Is Showing (Comment Login From Google/Twitter/Etc)

Last week, as we rolled out our new Facebook Comments system, we noted that two useful options were pulled at the last second: Twitter and Google login. And today brings more proof of that: the code still exists and works in the comment plugin itself!

As dug up by Inside Facebook, a simple line of JavaScript can add back in the option for users to log-in with their Google and Twitter credentials… → Read More

February 20th, 2011

Quora vs. StackExchange: Why, Joel, Why?

The Q&A land rush is on. Quora, of course, has been hyped to the moon, and not without reason. Fortune magazine recently profiled five more Q&A sites, and three new ones just launched: Cloudy, where your friends answer your questions via SMS; Setlr1, which is like Twitter for yes/no questions; and InboxQ, Q&A on Twitter. Is this a bubble full of copycats doomed to wither into Yahoo… → Read More

September 7th, 2010

Google Ready To Slurp Up More Yahoo Users With OpenID Sign-Ups

Google just made it easier for people with Yahoo accounts to sign up for a Google account. With one click, you can now use your Yahoo credentials to sign up for a Google account such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, or even AdWords. The one-click sign-up is done using OpenID, which both Google and Yahoo support. It also uses the OAuth authentication method quickly becoming the standard… → Read More

November 25th, 2009

Google Profiles Turn Into OpenIDs

As part of its push to go more social, Google has been attempting to unify its various account profiles into one Google Profile. And now it’s more useful. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has just tweeted out that Google Profiles can now be used as OpenIDs.

What this means is that you can sign into any site that accepts OpenID simply by using your Google Profile domain. Luckily, a few months ago Google… → Read More

September 9th, 2009

US Government To Embrace OpenID, Courtesy Of Google, Yahoo, PayPal Et Al.

During the video interview with OpenID evangelist Chris Messina I recorded earlier this year at a German conference about the state of OpenID, he expressed his wish that the Obama administration would soon start to embrace the decentralized, single sign-on method as a way for citizens to engage with the U.S. government online. Four months later, it looks like his dreams are becoming… → Read More

August 14th, 2009

Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID.

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the… → Read More

July 25th, 2009

FreeYourID Gives Up On Trying To Monetize OpenID

In an e-mail to its user base and with a short notice on its main website, FreeYourID has announced that it will be shutting down its service after nearly two years and a half in business. After August 15, the web service will be discontinued without a hint of explanation about the reason for the folding, although we suspect it may have something to do with VeriSign taking over the service’s main→ Read More

July 2nd, 2009

Can Sears Help OpenID Go Mainstream?

It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or other accounts to log into the community websites, enabling them to write product reviews and share… → Read More

May 30th, 2009

Vidoop Is Dead, Employees Getting Computers In Lieu Of Wages

Bad news for Portland-based Open-ID startup Vidoop (as well as Vidoop partners like AOL, MySpace and Flock): it’s apparently out of business. Earlier this month the company announced layoffs, but based on an email string that was forwarded to us, the company is now “officially out of business” and winding down.

From CEO Joel Norvell to Vidoop insiders, where he says that the company has no funds… → Read More

May 8th, 2009

Next09: Video Interview With Chris Messina On The Current State Of OpenID

The last video interview I did at the Next09 conference in Hamburg that I wanted to feature here on TechCrunch is the conversation I had with mr. Captain Web 2.0 himself, open web advocate Chris Messina. Besides his involvements with Citizen Agency, the DiSo Project and Vidoop, Messina somehow finds the time to also be closely involved with the OpenID Foundation as a board member and persistent… → Read More

April 27th, 2009

Facebook First Big Site To Really Embrace OpenID

Apparently it’s embrace the developer community day at Facebook. In addition to the news that they are making activity stream data available to third party developers, they’ll also be making an announcement around OpenID, we’ve heard. And importantly, the announcement is that they’ll become what’s called a relying party, meaning anyone with an OpenID (Yahoo, Google, AOL, MySpace are all issuers… → Read More

February 23rd, 2009

Social Web Q&A with Google's Kevin Marks

This guest post is written by Kevin Marks, Developer Advocate for OpenSocial at Google. Over the last 20 years he has alternated between giant companies and founding startups – BBC, The UK MultiMedia Corporation, Apple QuickTime, Technorati and now Google. He is one of the driving forces behind microformats.org and advisor to the Open Rights Group. He wants you to remember that URLs are… → Read More

February 5th, 2009

Facebook Pledges Support For OpenID; But Will Anything Change?

The OpenID Foundation has just announced that Facebook’s Luke Shepard will be joining the OpenID board as a corporate member, and that Facebook has made a $50,000 donation to the cause. The news marks the first time Facebook has officially signed on with the campaign, though some of its employees have been actively involved with improving the open standard for some time. At this point… → Read More

January 29th, 2009

OpenID + OAuth: Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together

Today, Google and Plaxo released a hybrid protocol that combines OpenID, the open online identity standard, with OAuth, the secure data portability standard. Too often, when a Website wants to import your contacts from another Web service, it asks for your login and pasowrd credentials. OAuth gets around that by sending you back to the original site where you login and authorize the one-time… → Read More

October 29th, 2008

Your Gmail Account is Now An OpenID

You may not know it, but you probably have an OpenID. If you have a Yahoo account, you have an OpenID. If you have a Windows Live account, you will soon have an OpenID. And today, if you have a Google e-mail account, you can also start using your Gmail address as an OpenID.

By joining the OpenID movement, Google completes the trifecta and adds all of its Gmail users to the hundreds of millions… → Read More

October 27th, 2008

Windows Live Adds Support For OpenID, Calls It De Facto Login Standard

Login standard OpenID has gotten a huge boost today from Microsoft, as the company has announced that users will soon be able to login to any OpenID site using their Windows Live IDs. With over 400 million Windows Live accounts (many of which see frequent use on the Live’s Mail and Messenger services), the announcement is a massive win for OpenID. And Microsoft isn’t just supporting OpenID – the… → Read More

October 22nd, 2008

Facebook Connect and OpenID Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated”

Editor’s Note: This post was contributed by John McCrea, VP of marketing for Plaxo, which is at the vanguard of the data portability movement. He also blogs at The Real McCrea and does a weekly video podcast about “opening up the Social Web” together with Joseph Smarr, David Recordon, and Chris Messina at The Social Web TV. As some of you know, I am a strong advocate of an evolution from… → Read More

August 20th, 2008

Verisign's Personal Identity Portal Is Half Way To Password Bliss

Verisign’s new Personal Identity Portal (PIP from now on) isn’t the sexiest application out there to help you manage passwords. But it has Verisign’s strong reputation for security behind it, and it is a surprisingly easy way to manage website credentials. PIP is a a single sign in solution that supports both OpenID (you are issued a Verisign OpenID) and direct sign in to a… → Read More

July 22nd, 2008

MySpace Confirms OpenID Support, Launches Data Availability On Flixster and Eventful

MySpace is rolling out a couple of announcements this morning a day ahead of Facebook’s F8 developer conference. The first is confirmation of our story that they are supporting OpenID, although they aren’t releasing any details (It’s our belief that they will first issue OpenID IDs, and possibly become a relying party later). The company is also announcing the launch of two new… → Read More

July 21st, 2008

MySpace To Join OpenID, Bringing Total Enabled Accounts to Over A Half Billion

MySpace will announce support for the OpenID single sign-on framework sometime this week, we’ve heard from multiple sources. This will be the second largest implementation ever and will bring the total number of OpenID-enabled accounts to over half a billion. MySpace’s 200 million user IDs join Yahoo’s 250 million or so accounts, plus accounts from a number of other large… → Read More

July 11th, 2008

AOL Implements Vidoop's OpenID-Based Authentication

As of yesterday afternoon, AOL has implemented Vidoop’s visual authentication system as part of its OpenID initiative, which was formally launched in February 2007. Vidoop, a startup that replaces usernames and passwords with image grids, partnered with AOL to provide its OpenID users with an extra layer of security. This delivers Vidoop a potential user base of about 100 million users. → Read More

June 23rd, 2008

Microsoft's First Step In Accepting OpenID SignOns – HealthVault

Over 16 months after first declaring its support for the OpenID authentication platform, Microsoft has finally implemented it for the first time, allowing for OpenID logins on its Health Vault medical site. Unfortunately, Health Vault will only support authentication from two OpenID providers: Trustbearer and Verisign. Whatever happened to the Open in OpenID? The rationale behind the limited… → Read More

March 30th, 2008

FriendFeed, The Centralized Me, and Data Portability

It’s definitely FriendFeed month in Silicon Valley. The company, founded by ex-Googlers, let you aggregate information and activity streams from all of the various services that you use on the internet – Flickr photos, YouTube videos, blog posts, delicious bookmarks, Twitter messages, and other stuff (33 services total to date). Your friends subscribe to your stuff, and see a stream of… → Read More

March 24th, 2008

Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies?

OpenID, a distributed single sign on solution that allows people to sign into different services with the same login credentials, gained significant momentum over the last year as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL all pledged their support for the initiative. There are two ways companies/websites can participate in the OpenID framework – as “issuing parties” or as “relying… → Read More

March 11th, 2008

Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass

OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right? Well, not exactly. First, those big companies only issue IDs, they don’t accept them yet. And the user experience with OpenID is just plain bad. Users have to remember their OpenID URL, and are… → Read More

February 7th, 2008

OpenID Welcomes Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM

As anticipated by TechCrunch UK in early January, OpenID is welcoming some big new partners to the club – Microsoft, Google, Verisign and IBM (TechCrunch UK anticipated all but Microsoft). Google has been dabbling with OpenID for some time with its Blogger platform (and Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator of OpenID, is now a Google employee). Yahoo also announced support for OpenID earlier this… → Read More

January 18th, 2008

Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger

After testing OpenID’s as logins to Google’s Blogger in Draft program in November, Google has become an OpenID provider itself. The news confirms TechCrunch UK’s story of January 9, which also predicted that IBM and VeriSign would soon be joining the OpenID train. Effective immediately, Blogger users are able to use their blogs URL as an OpenID login, after toggling the option… → Read More

January 17th, 2008

Yahoo Implements OpenID; Massive Win For The Project

The rumor last week was that Google (as well as Verisign and IBM) were mulling over the idea of joining the OpenID 2.0 single sign-on framework. But the real news comes today, as Yahoo and its roughly 250 million user IDs officially jump on the bandwagon. Today, there are only approximately 120 million valid OpenID accounts. In one move, Yahoo more than triples that number. The service will be… → Read More

January 8th, 2008

The OpenID Train Steams Ahead: Google, IBM and Verisign Said To Be Joining

TechCrunch UK’s Mike Butcher is reporting that Google, IBM and Verisign are in late stage discussions with the OpenID Foundation. This news comes on the same day that Google, Facebook and Plaxo joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Google has been testing OpenID with its Blogger platform since late last year, but this is said to be a more general implementation across core Google properties. → Read More