I’ve been mildly obsessed with the idea of SSO for the web since I fist heard about people working on it some years ago. Despite the past hype it has received progress and adoption have been fairly slow. Movement, however, is being made with sites like

When I first signed up for there were only few sites that utilized them for SSO [LiveJournal (shares creator with myopenid), Zooomr, and a couple of others I can’t recall]. Counting now, the lists is up to 33, but with only Technorati standing out to me.

With something in place like OpenID.net sites looking to implement SSO are now free to let users choose their SSO provider and use whichever to authenticate them. A system like this becoming the De facto standard for web logins currently sounds too good to be true, but it or something similar will come around. I know that I am more willing to try a site when it supports an OpenID sign in, as it is practically effortless.

Revel in a fantasy for a sec and imagine logging in to a social community site using SSO. It queries other SSO photo sharing sites for your participation and lets you search for a photo to use to identify yourself on this new site. It then prompts your with your “about you” blurp from your blog, from myspace, and others. You choose one to start with as a template. You then select which photosharing sites along with criteria to use for populating your “recent photos banner” and set your recent blog entries to come from a chosen service. Your profile is instantly generated and accessable as a part of this new site you just joined. And this is just my silly thought up scenario. I can’t imagine what may be possible if various services decide to play well together in the future.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Scott, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.