Simon Willison's Slidecast on OpenID

OpenID LogoI've been hearing a lot about OpenID the last six months, probably because Sxip and Bryght have a local presence. It's a cool technology solving a problem I certainly deal with day-to-day. But will it rise from the primordial idea soup into mainstream acceptance? According to Simon Willison, yes:

When Bill Gates stands up at a security conference in America and spends seven minutes on stage talking about a technology, it's not really a niche proposition anymore.

Evil Ben and MenaWilson recently gave a talk that was converted into a "slidecast": http://simonwillison.net/2007/Mar/12/slidecast/. It does an excellent job, the best I've seen to date, of explaining OpenID and the problems it's meant to solve. I appreciated his inclusion of a "What's wrong with it?" section. And it's not without humour, we're introduced to the evil alter egos of Ben and Mena Trott!

At the end of the presentation Wilson says:

I don't think OpenID is ready for mainstream adoption yet, but it's definitely ready for the early adapters.

It's very cool to see the Drupal community among the early adapters with an OpenID implementation: http://drupal.org/project/openid. James Walker (walkah), and Johnny Bufu of Sxip, gave OpenID technical details in a recent conference presentation.

Willison thinks there's business opportunities to be had, using http://freeyourid.com/'s inclusion of an OpenID with the domain name as an example. I suspect a year from now we'll see some cool OpenID ideas implemented in Drupal.