February 16th, 2007
AOL and OpenID
John Panzer works in AOL's identity group. On Valentine's Day, he announced that AOL is supporting OpenID, a URL-based, open standard for user-centric identity on the 'Net.
This works not just for AOL accounts, but AIM screennames as well. So, if your AIM screenname is frizzle, then your OpenID would be http://openid.aol.com/frizzle. So, find a Web site that supports OpenID and login! You'll enter the URL of your AOL OpenID, be redirected to an AOL login page (if you're not already logged in at AOL) and then back to the sit where you're logged in. Works like a charm.
John says that AOL isn't supporting OpenID as a way to log into their own products…yet. They're working on it. And, they'll continue to work on compatibility and OpenID 2.0 as that spec firms up.
AOL deserves praise for choosing to support an open standard instead of creating their own standard like Yahoo! and Google did. Having a big Internet property like AOL lend its support will really add momentum to user-centric identity and OpenID.
Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
