OpenID with Strong Authentication

There’s an interesting discussion on Mark Evan’s blog about the potential of a killer application for OpenID:

One of the biggest challenges facing OpenID is it’s a solution (universal identity management) looking for a problem to solve.

Sure, it’s a pain having to remember different usernames and passwords (unless you lazily use the same ones for everything) but most people don’t see it as a huge issue, which means OpenID has failed to gain much traction. And to be frank, that won’t change much even with major players such as Google, Yahoo and AOL starting to climb on the OpenID bandwagon recently.

One of the applications the Evan’s points to with some enthusiasm is PageOnce, which is a universal dashboard for the web.

As OpenID gains recognition, how will other standards be developed to cooperate with decentralized single-sign-on?

Scott Kveton considers portable social networking and solutions that make it viable along side OpenID:

Social network fatigue is getting worse with every new site that comes along and it doesn’t have to. I should be able to sign up for a site with my OpenID and be prompted to import my contacts/friends accordingly. Ideally I could import them based on some criteria or tag; friends, colleagues, co-workers, etc. In the very near future, you won’t go to social networking sites to interact with your friends … every single site will have social networking built in.

There are a couple of solutions coming down the line. Tom and the folks at Barnraiser have been working on a portable social network solution that is based on OpenID. Videntity and claimID have also been working on ways to share contacts based on XFN. Both of these solutions adhere strictly to the limited format defined for XFN. These solutions suffer from the fax problem; faxes weren’t interesting until everybody had them … so how did they take off? There are also several other efforts as well.

Kveton post also touches on an interesting profile exchange protocol for OpenID, SREG.