My 2 Cents to the OpenID Foundation

After my last blog post about OpenID i spent some time on the OpenID forums to see what was going on. The impression I gathered was that there were some genuine efforts to recognize emails as valid OpenID's in the upcoming OpenID 2.1 specifications. Is it a case of too little too late? Time will tell. 

The problem is that emails were never recognized as OpenID's right from the beginning. And that was the kiss of death for OpenID. It is beyond me, living in a world were practically every one uses an email address to log in almost anywhere, a group of well meaning intelligent people can completely miss its importance. Did they think the concept of a url as an identity could be showed down the whole worlds throat? 

So I rolled up my sleeves and went to work on this one, and I posted my solution on the Openid forum. The jist of what I had to say was, "The user MUST be able to authenticate himself with OpenID using his email address if he so chooses to". 

For those of you who are technically oriented you can see my solution suggested to OpenID foundation here.

As a side note myspace has come out with there own version of OpenID support, which is not compatible with the OpenID specification. Another example of vested interests tearing apart the concept of OpenID. I think myspace has really shot itself in its foot this time. They really should have supported directed identity in conformance to OpenID 2.0 and SREG 1.0. They are really on there way to "nospace".