Saturday, June 17, 2006

I-Names and OpenID

How exciting, I think I qualify as the first person to ever log into an OpenID site with an i-name. While I did have the honor of doing the first tests, I want to thank Kevin, Brian and Larry from JanRain who built the server and helped me install and configure it. I also want to thank the ooTao team, Steve, Barry and Frank who did all the work to get our i-names infrastructure to the point that the OpenID integration could work. It was an amazing collaboration of a bunch of very smart and very dedicated people.

I have to say, having typed in my OpenID url to authenticate a bunch of times, using my i-name is a really cool alternative. It’s easier to type, and the display name is a lot cleaner, it feels a lot more like a label that represents _me_.

Launch approaches and I think there are going to be a lot of these really cool ‘firsts’ with i-names. In the next days, weeks and months we are going to see a proliferation of i-brokers and i-services that embrace the user-centric vision.  I’ll let you know about these as they become available.

Back to work, lots to do for the launch on Tuesday.