myOpenID

» see myopenid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

OpenID was a good idea with a distribution problem. The premise was that your identity on the web should be a URL you own rather than a row in somebody's user table, so you would prove who you are once to a provider of your choosing and every other site would ask that provider instead of asking you for another password. Janrain launched myOpenID in 2006 to be that provider for people who had no interest in running one themselves.

For a few years it worked in the places where the idea was popular, which mostly meant developer tools and the more technically minded corners of the web. Sites that accepted OpenID put a small box on the sign-in form where you typed a URL, and for a lot of those users the URL they typed was a myopenid.com address.

On 4 September 2013 Janrain emailed its users that the service would be switched off on 1 February 2014. The CEO, Larry Drebes, gave the reason plainly: Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo had adopted open identity standards themselves and had beaten OpenID with them. Five companies that already knew who you were had made a sixth option unnecessary.

~ the record ~

~ what the standard promised ~

The pitch was decentralization, back when that word carried no crypto weight at all. Anybody could run a provider. Your identity could live on a domain you paid for, and if a provider turned bad you could point the domain somewhere else and keep the identity intact. That is a genuinely better arrangement than the one the web ended up with, and it lost anyway.

~ the fall ~

By the time I would have needed one login across the whole web, the button was already sitting there and it belonged to Facebook. That was the part that never worked for ordinary users: typing a URL into a login form. Nobody could remember which provider they had used, the sign-in flow bounced you to a second site and back, and the whole thing asked people to understand a layer of the web they had no reason to think about. Facebook Connect arrived in December 2008 and replaced all of it with a blue rectangle.

The other crack was economic. Running a free identity provider costs money and returns nothing, since the design deliberately keeps you out of the relationship between the user and the site. Facebook and Google were happy to pay for that position, because knowing which sites you log into is the product. Janrain was selling a hosted login widget to enterprises, and myopenid.com was a free service running on the side of it.

~ what replaced it ~

OpenID Connect, the version rebuilt on OAuth 2.0 and published in 2014, is the part that survived. It sits under nearly every sign-in-with button in use today, including the ones belonging to the companies Drebes named. What did not survive is the part about choosing your own provider. You still authenticate through one, and it is one of four companies rather than one you picked.

Mozilla tried the original premise once more with Persona and shut that down on 30 November 2016. myopenid.com has not answered since 2014.

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