Budhajeewa's Blog

“OpenID” is a service that allows people to login to various web sites, without providing email address and password each time. When the user pointed a website to his OpenID, that site can grab the required – and allowed – information from the users’s OpenID. Therefore, OpenID can be identified as a “Online Identity Card” of a person or a particular personality (One can have several personalities online, thus several OpenIDs).

Currently, one’s email address is considered as the center of his online identity, only lesser number of websites use OpenID. On the other hand, even OpenID hasn’t recognized what are it’s potentials.

Every webiste asks us for our email address, when we create an user-account in it. All those websites consider our email addresses as the mirror of online personality. But, what I think is, this should be changed, every website should consider OpenID as the mirror of it’s users online identity. What that means is, websites should ask us for our OpenID when we are creating an account, not our email address!

There are several reasons why it should be like that:

Because the purpose of an email account is just sending emails, it lacks several characteristics that something representing one’s online identity should be having. Beause of this reason, we all have to provide websites with our information like birthday, gender and location each time we create an account in a new website. This is the same since creating user account in websites started!

“One’s OpenID should be a mirror reflecting his online life.”, what that simply means is,

We should be able to ..

• connect one or more email accounts to it.
• save our birthday, address in it.
• connect our personal website, blog and profiles in other websites to it.
• connect our online bank accounts like “PayPal” to it.
• save things that’d represent our personality – like activities, interests, liked movies and music – in it.
• add things that we like the world to know about us to it.
• publish our online activites – that we have OKayed to publish – in it.
• consider our OpenIDs as the main representation of our online personality.
• limit each website the information it can grab from our OpenIDs.

If all the mentioned features – and plus – are available in our OpenID accounts, it’ll really be a mirror reflecting our online personalities. If websites can grab these information from our OpenIDs, when we are creating a new user account, that site can get a good understanding of who we are and what we like etc. And also, one website can get to know what we are doing in another website and work accordingly.

For an example, if I liked a artist in Last.FM, that activity is recorded in my OpenID. Then Facebook can get to know that I liked that artist in Last.FM through my OpenID, and ask me whether I want to like that artist in Facebook too!

Because of all the websites that we are a part of are connected through our OpenID, we can sync all those accounts to match each other instantly, rather than doing it manually like now!

If wanted, national governments can provide citizens features to connect their national identity card with their OpenID, so that we can join our real and cyber lives together!

We can experience the web more social in this way.

Every coin has two sides, we’d have to be more careful about our online privacy as features to be opened grow!