Terrell Russell: This Old Network

So Fred and I have been scheming. The recent push behind OpenID and its impending uptake by a great many people has led us to the decision to rebrand claimID just a bit.

We retooled the documentation, made it more apparent to the new user the benefits of having and using an OpenID and generally tidied up our original copy as we prepare for that “big growth” that we keep seeing poke its head around the corner.

From the official blog post:

At ClaimID, our strength has always been translating the complex into the simple. We want to give you the best solutions, without requiring you to read a protocol or understand code. As web identity plays a greater role in all of our lives, we feel that we can really help people by enabling them with solutions simply. And as OpenID grows (and it will grow, says Bill Gates), we want to be there to help you take advantage of this amazing and useful tool.

We’ve seen lots of convergence in the last few months – and even more in the last couple days – and we want to make sure we’re helping as many people as possible follow along at home.

Scott Kveton from JanRain has a nice writeup on the latest happenings:

OpenID has always been about convergence. When Brad, David and Johannes talked about how OpenID and Yadis could work together over a year ago. When the XRI folks brought their amazing people and technology to be integrated into OpenID 2.0 last Spring. This past Summer when Sxip Identity joined the OpenID party by joining in on developing the specification and offering up their attribute exchange specification to the OpenID community. And now today, we have a commitment from Microsoft to take part in the OpenID community as well as enable the technology for their future identity products.

There are a couple of points I’d like to make outside of the above announcement to hopefully address any concerns that the OpenID community might have:

• JanRain will never require users of our libraries or services to use Windows CardSpace ™. We offer support for this technology as another option for users much like using our Safe SignIn and Personal Icon technologies on MyOpenID.com. We’ll also continue to support the OpenID efforts going on with Mozilla and Firefox.
• Windows CardSpace ™ is shipping with Vista today and is a well thought-out technology that helps address many of the privacy and security concerns that people have had with OpenID. OpenID helps users describe their identity across many sites in a public fashion. The two together are very complimentary products and each has its strength.
• Microsoft did not cave in to the OpenID community and the OpenID community is giving nothing up to Microsoft. This is a collaboration on bringing the best technology to the marketplace as quickly as possible to help secure users and solve the single sign-on solution once and for all.
• Please reserve judgment on what this all means until you see it all work together. The technology is really quite simple and the ramifications for end-users is huge. It also goes a very long way to completely addressing the phishing concerns we’ve heard so much about.

Tags: claimID - identity - OpenID