Simon Willison’s Weblog

Stack Overflow Blog: OpenID, One Year Later. Google’s support is a huge deal—61% of Stack Overflow accounts use Google. Google’s implementation of directed identity has caused problems though, since Google provide a different OpenID for each domain making it hard for Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Super User to correlate accounts. Their solution is to require a (verified) e-mail address from Google OpenID users using sreg and use that as a key for the accounts.

# 14th April 2010, 8:46 pm / openid, stackoverflow, google, directedidentity, email, sreg, login, registration

Yahoo! OpenIDs are the same for all RPs. I had assumed that Yahoo! would be using directed identity to provide a different OpenID for each user/site combination, to prevent correlation of accounts. I was incorrect; they’re just using it for easier sign-in, with the same auto-generated URL used for every site.

# 19th January 2008, 9:05 am / directedidentity, openid, yahoo

Yahoo! Announces Support for OpenID. Here’s the official press release: “Yahoo! Support Triples Number of OpenID Accounts to 368 million”. Directed identity gets a mention; it’s going to be enabled for www.yahoo.com and www.flickr.com. The public beta starts on January 30th.

# 17th January 2008, 2:29 pm / directedidentity, flickr, openid, yahoo

James Henstridge: OpenID 2.0. Excellent description of the new features in OpenID 2.0, including a clear explanation of directed identity and attribute exchange.

# 7th December 2007, 11:53 am / openid, directedidentity, attributeexchange, inames, openid2, james-henstridge

OpenID 2.0 Final(ly)! Launched at the Internet Identity Workshop. The most interesting feature is probably directed identity, which goes a long way to solving some of the usability issues involved in users having to enter their own URLs.

# 5th December 2007, 9:01 pm / openid, openid2, iiw, directedidentity