It was an inevitable that a company would come along an release a standard for single sign on that had the financial backing to go build strong partnerships and more importantly, mainstream buzz. Yesterday Caroline McCarthy highlighted some of the challenges facing OpenID and I have to say the battle between Facebook and the open standards community is about to get pretty fierce.
So far hundreds if not thousand of sites have implemented OpenID but unfortunately most people don’t know what the service is. One of the main reasons? A lack of a centralized public relations team to spread the word and little incentive for any of the participants to join. It’s a great service but it doesn’t have the more than 120 million (or probably 130 million) users that Facebook now has.
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I'm not sure how much the absence of a PR force plays into OpenID's lackluster rate of adoption. Rather, I think you hit on the big reason that Connect has such killer potential as a single sign on platform right at the end — 120 million-plus users coming from a single, established online community. The vast majority of services that have adopted OpenID to date are small new services just trying to get some traction. This doesn't really do OpenID any favors as a platform.
Comment by Jamie Scheu — December 3, 2008 @ 10:54 am