Finally, light at the end of the tunnel, for OpenID

In the last few days two new pieces of information come as great news for OpenID. One for the long term, and the other for the short term.

Mozilla Firefox's demonstration of a single sign on with OpenID is testimony to the fact that Browsers will eventually manage the users identity. It may take five years or more to happen.

What is interesting for OpenID is that Browsers will not support proprietary "Connect's". Unless of course the Connect vendor also happens to own the Browser. I am hearing of Twitter Connect and Google Connect. The only "Connect" that will be common to all browsers will be OpenID! I think vendors coming out with their own Connect's, are venturing into something really futile.

The short term good news for OpenID is the webfinger protocol being developed. This will allow for email discovery, paving the way for emails as OpenID's. 

The onus on discovery lies with the email provider which is only natural, and that is the only way it can work. This won't work if non email providers were OP's. Atleast not as equals to the email providers. Non email providers can issue virtual email addresses if they like. But it is not the real thing and they will have to dish out the real email address via SREG or AX.

If Facebook had supported OpenID as an OP with SREG support earlier, me as an OpenID community member would have been hard pressed to support the webfinger protocol. Another way out would have been the centralized discovery mechanism which is not going to happen anytime soon, and Facebook would have been the de facto centralized mechanism until then!

To really make OpenID happen I always believed we need one of the biggies. Ebay or Amazon or someone like that, and these guys won't play without an email address. With the webfinger protocol for email addresses they will definitely come on board. So it becomes very important for the community to move the webfinger protocol fast.

We can now look forward to great times with OpenID!