AOL has announced the roll out of OpenID to its entire user base, some 63 million users.
OpenId is a community/ open effort to establish a decentralized user identity database that allows users to login to different sites, in a similar way to Microsoft’s previously (failed) efforts with Passport, where as currently user logins/ IDs are established on a per site basis. For example, an OpenID might log you in to your email account with Yahoo, reader with Bloglines and Adwords account with Google, at least in theory anyway, where as currently you require an account at each.
Despite the occasional noise from pundits, particularly in the open source community, to date OpenID has not been adopted in any great way, mostly due to the failure of large sites/ companies to embrace the concept, after all, why adopt OpenID if hardly anyone is using it?
AOL’s embrace of OpenID changes the game considerably, after all 63 million users literally overnight now have OpenID’s they can use at other sites. Imagine the possibilities from a marketing perspective knowing that you can now offer immediate access to a closed/ private service to 63million AOL users. AOL signing up to OpenID could well be the tipping point that drives OpenID adoption across a broad range of sites because simply it now makes economic sense to do so, it becomes a sales/ marketing tool instead of just a plain old boring ID thing.
On the flip side, AOL sites/ products currently do not accept OpenID logins, however they are “actively working on it”. As some one who does not currently have an account at AOL, nor use any of its services, I’d be a whole lot more likely to check AOL out when they adopt OpenID, as I’d think were others….and don’t for one minute think that AOL doesn’t know this either.
Originally posted on February 18, 2007 @ 7:59 pm