mrtopf reminded me of putting up my slides from the IdentityCamp last weekend. Here they are.

Since there are already a good number of identity providers we did not want to become yet another one for two reasons:

• It would stick our users to our signon service which is quite contradictory to the idea of single signon. If every service did so we would end up with hundreds of OpenID identifiers per user which does not sound very "single".
• It would change our business and liabilities in ways we did not want to. We want to do what we currently do in the best possible ways: Let our users create beautiful homepages.

Fortunately enough, there is OpenID delegation, by means of wich we can offload the "in control of an url" assertion to real OpenID providers. Therefore we think doing so is good in several ways:

• Our users greatly benefit from using their homepage as an OpenID.
• It fosters the use of OpenID and the business of hard providers.
• It lets us do our business good.

So, it seems that page creators like Jimdo or web hosting in general constitutes a real case for deployment of OpenIDs: Delegation as a service.

OpenID is a lightweight url based signon and identiy system.

This means that I can use an internet address (url) like http://paulpanther.com/ as login identifier to other websites. OpenID provides a mechanism to verify that I am in control of that certain url. As such OpenID is a signon system. It is even a so-called single signon system where you only need one identifier (and password) to log into many sites.

But because of its url characteristic my OpenID identifier is also a clickable
target in the web. And that target could reveal even more information about me. So, whenever I log into a site with my OpenID and leave a comment or contribute an article that site could link my content to the target of my identifier. As such OpenID is an identity system, and if used in smart ways, even a reputation system.

Now it seems quite self suggesting that I want my homepage as an OpenID.

When we started thinking about urls and identity at Jimdo it quite soon became clear that we wanted to support OpenID as both the single signon and the reputation system. Single signon, because we find that users already have to remember too many names and passwords today. And we wanted to support the reputation system because we believe that our users will greatly benefit from using their homepage names as their OpenIDs.