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Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Larry Drebes, VP of Engineering and Founder of JanRain. JanRain has a product named Pibb which we reviewed earlier this year and they also are heavy participants into OpenID. It’s OpenID 2.0 that we spoke about for well over an hour. I look at OpenID as an interesting challenge, one which I would love to be the head of marketing for. It’s a developer product, not a nice, fluffy marketing product which makes it interesting to try to get the mainstream to adopt. There is a huge need for a way to use the same identity credentials at multiple locations. Just yesterday, I had to create logins at 9 new services and each one basically asked me the same things - what a pain.

We spoke about the technology side of OpenID 2.0 for half the call, and the marketing/outreach side for the other half. Here are my notes from the call. And please read Marshall Kirkpatrick’s article on making OpenID easy.

OpenID 2.0 is more secure with better cryptography than the previous releases. Larry kept hitting on the point that the 2.0 release will have actual documentation which is a good thing. I hear there are several hundred pages of documentation. Available on the Kindle?

OpenID 2.0 comes with identifyer recycling - Larry noted that the largest Internet players (msn, aol, etc.) can often run out of logins, and OpenID 2.0 fixes this as it allows the providers to reuse the logins as needed.

Directed Identity is another new feature. Basically what this allows a site to do is to associate a person’s OpenID login with other accounts to build a reputation level. This is pretty cool - could be the reputation system we’ve been speaking about for ten years now.

There are 160 million "enabled" users - this includes any AOL user. Of course this is not the same as "active" users - the 160 million refers to accounts that could be used with OpenID.

Apple’s Leopard operating system comes with built-in OpenID libraries. This is the first time that an OS comes with OpenID built into the core.

We briefly spoke about Pibb and Larry noted, "We believe communication is the killer app of the Internet and the current crop of communication tools has stalled on features and functions." Pibb has 8000 users and they are working towards a 2.0 release early next year. Naturally it will be rich in OpenID functionality.

One of the things I asked about is why there is no browser plugin with OpenID built-in. This way, when I hit a site that uses it, it automatically logs me in and gets everything setup in the background without any work on my part. Larry said there is a plugin in the works for Firefox called "Seatbelt" and it’s created by Verisign.

There is talk that Google and Microsoft will begin supporting OpenID as well. Google announced yesterday that Blogger now supports OpenID for commenting.

Fine, the technical side of OpenID 2.0 is set and ready-to-go. It’s hot. Now, what I’d like to see is marketing staff added to the project. Let’s make this a bit sexier, and way more consumer-friendly. I’d love to see OpenID camps only for marketing. OpenID has to become as common a term as Google is for searches or iPod is for music devices. When we reach this point, the 160 million enabled users will actually become active users. And then instead of focusing our time building "YALS" (yet another login system), we can focus on building great applications and let the login be handled by OpenID.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 8:30 am and is filed under Insights, OpenID, Pibb. 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.