Month: March 2007

My selection criteria for “Openid Service Providers”:

Needs:
Reliability:  As noted previously, an offline service provider is not one.
Multiple Profile/Role:  I serve multiple roles online and having to maintain multiple separate identities is troublesome.  I would prefer to maintain one identity with multiple views. (Verisign)
Delegate:  Being able to set up a web site with server capability through a single identity service – rather then configuring this capability on multiple web sites. (Claimid)
Aggregation:  Being able to consolidate multiple identities in a single view is going to be more and more necessary (Claimid)

Nice to have:
Identity through association:  Claiming (in a secure manner) web content and personal associations is nice – but not really what is necessary for me.

Anyone have any other criteria I should include?

Originally posted on villiageidiot.vox.com

I ran in to an interesting problem this morning.  I sat down to compose a message about Openid and a review of the different identify servers.  When I tried to sign on to look at some of the different identify servers I discovered that claimid.com was ‘not available’.

Because I am an addict to all things new, I had been experimenting with different web sites which serve as identity servers.  The appeal of Claimid was that it provided a convenient way to consolidate the different identity servers.  It had become my starting point for my identity.

And now I discover that the starting point is unavailable.  That illustrates a criteria you should include when considering identity servers (as opposed to consumers):  when your server goes down you lose the ability to use that identity to sign in to different consuming services.

I have identities with AOL, Vox, Verisign, Claimid, Livejournal, Typepad, WordPress and then my own hosted solution.

• Claimid: Until today I would have expressed a preference for the mix of services provided by claimid.  They provide a collection of services around Openid which I haven’t encountered elsewhere.
• Verisign:  I like the Verisign service next best and, because there is a presumably larger organization behind that service they might be more reliable.  They also have some additional capabilities built in to the service which I like.
• My hosting service provider is worth every penny I pay them and since I don’t pay them much – I can’t really rely on my own web site as an identity server.
• Vox/Live Journal/Typepad:  The Six Apart family of web sites is probably very reliable.  They have had their history of reliability issues but in general they are pretty solid.  To my knowledge, they provide only vanilla identity services though.
• AIM:  Finally, AOL (AIM and Netscape) is, because of it’s size is my most reliable identity service.  But there is absolutely no bells or whistles with these services.

Hopefully, now that I’ve written this up claimid will be back online and I can go on my way with my original thought.  If the problem persists though – I may need to stop using them as my starting point for identity.

Originally posted on villiageidiot.vox.com