JanRain Blog

Relying Party Stats as of July 1, 2009

2009-07-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

June was another strong month for OpenID adoption, with 2,722 new websites choosing to accept third party authentication. We began 2009 with just a shade over 30,000 OpenID enabled websites, and six months later, are on track to exceed that total in this year alone. Turn-key solutions like RPX have helped transform the market, making it easy for website operators without an expertise in the protocol to deploy third party authentication from the major identity providers.

For a directory of some sites that are OpenID-enabled, please visit the myOpenID Site Directory, or the OpenID Directory.

Sears Adopts OpenID, Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, and Windows Live ID Using JanRain RPX

2009-07-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

It is an exciting day here at JanRain. We are announcing a great partnership with Viewpoints Network who has integrated RPX into its technology platform for the benefit of customers such as Sears. Website visitors to mysears.com or mykmart.com, which were recently launched and announced, can now easily register and login using an existing account from Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, Yahoo!, or any OpenID account of their choice.

We are finding that RPX is a great complement to platform providers such as Viewpoints as it reduces the costs and burden from their development team while allowing them to provide a great solution direct to their customers. Here is what Matt Moog, Founder and CEO of Viewpoints had to say....

"As the social web becomes a bigger part of our everyday interactions and the boundaries separating the myriad of social networks blur, portable online identities will become critically important. By integrating JanRain's RPX product into our platform we instantly bring a market leading third party registration and login offering to our clients that makes it seamless for our community members to easily connnect their social graph and activity stream across the web."

In addition, Sears announnced this launch today as they are the first major retailer to adopt OpenID.

Relying Party Stats as of June 1, 2009

2009-06-12T14:14:00.000-07:00

OpenID continues to gain market adoption at a steady rate, and in the month of May, the number of OpenID-enabled sites surged at a rate of 86 new enabled sites per day. There are now over 45,000 sites at which you can sign in with an OpenID. As we have mentioned previously, this number is understated, as we count umbrella sites like Blogger, Wordpress and LiveJournal (to name a few) as single sites, despite the fact that OpenID commenting is enabled at hundreds of thousands of unique blogs using those services.

We like to think that free platform solutions like RPX have helped fuel adoption for OpenID, by making it simple for website operators to deploy third party authentication in a few hours or less.

RPX integrated into mojoPortal’s open source CMS platform

2009-05-27T15:29:00.000-07:00

MojoPortal, a popular open source CMS, recently integrated RPX into its platform. This allows mojoPortal customers to easily configure RPX directly from their mojo admin console. Below is a screenshot of the integration within the mojoPortal admin menu:

The mojoPortal CMS currently has over 4,000 users and is the third most popular download in the Microsoft Web Application Gallery, with 18,000 downloads in the past month. Even though mojoPortal had already integrated OpenID support into its platform and on the site a year ago, they decided to adopt RPX after observing its superb user experience and ease of deployment.

Additionally, mojoPortal integrated RPX on its homepage to allow customers and new visitors to easily sign in to the site with an existing third party account:

We're excited to see content management systems like mojoPortal make it even easier for new sites to add third party authentication.

Relying Party Stats as of May 1, 2009

2009-05-15T13:07:00.001-07:00

42,235 sites are now enabled to accept OpenID logins. This number continues to grow dramatically as website operators seek to simplify their registration and login processes, and as end users increasingly demand control over the identity and where they take it across the web. Our suite of website enablement solutions (like RPX) are fueling this adoption by making it easy for websites to accept OpenID logins, with only a snippet of code required.

If you come across a neat website that is OpenID enabled, let us know by sending an email to directory AT myopenid DOT com. We'll add it to our directory of OpenID enabled sites.

New from Google and RPX

2009-05-13T23:03:00.000-07:00

This morning Google announced two improvements to their OpenID provider service:

1) Extended user profile data. In addition to providing a verified email address, Google is now providing first and last name, country, and language via OpenID Attribute Exchange. These rich data fields can be used to help streamline registration for new users visiting your site.

2) Support for a user friendly popup based sign-in experience. This flow is a product of the OpenID User Experience Working Group, and keeps the sign-in process in the context of the current site by opening a small popup window to the provider. The result is a smoother sign-in experience that is easier to understand for users new to third party authentication.

We've been working with Google to test out these new features, both of which are now available to RPX based sites. Below is a screenshot of the popup experience, and you can try it out right now at Uservoice. The popup window appears when a user clicks the Google button.

Also new in RPX today is support for OpenID immediate mode in our widget. Immediate is a special mode of OpenID that makes the sign-in experience even faster and easier for returning users. If a user has already chosen to "remember the approval" for your website, immediate mode makes it so that the decision can be asserted on behalf of the user without redirecting the window to their provider. Facebook recently announced that will be using immediate mode to help returning users sign-in to facebook.com, and that same technology is now available instantly to every RPX customer. The user simply clicks the "Sign-in" button, and without leaving the current site they are signed in.

Technologies that power the web are constantly in flux. APIs, protocols, and user interface best practices are contantly changing and improving, and it can be a challenge to keep up with the latest technology from each provider.

Our mission with RPX is to help users get signed in to your website quickly and easily. A huge part of fulfilling that goal is making sure you always have access to the best technology available from the OpenID community and the top providers. With our API based software as a service model, when new technologies are released that can improve the sign-in process for your website, we implement them in RPX and they instantly become available for your website.

Immediate mode and the extended Google data fields are now live for every RPX based site. If you are interested in testing out the Google popup support, please email us at support@rpxnow.com. Following a short testing period the popup will be automatically turned on for all RPX customers. Additionally, when other OpenID providers come online supporting the new popup experience, they will instantly be enabled in RPX.

Sign-in using Twitter with RPX

2009-05-11T10:09:00.000-07:00

Our mission with RPX is to help users get signed in to your website quickly and easily. We do this by helping visitors sign-in using an account they already have, without creating yet another username/password or verify an email address.

Today we are happy to announce support for Twitter based sign-in via RPX. Adding Twitter to your RPX grid will help you connect with the millions of users who use Twitter each day to stay connected online. When you add Twitter as a sign-in option, your users will easily be able to sign up for your site by clicking the Twitter button and authorizing your web application. It is simple, and easy for your users:

When a user logs off of your website, RPX remembers that they used Twitter to sign-in. The return experience greets them with a friendly message and one click sign-in experience:

If you already run a website that uses RPX for authentication, you may add twitter support by clicking "Configure Providers" from your developer console at rpxnow.com. If you are new to RPX, simply visit rpxnow.com to create a developer account and get started.

Rich API Access

In addition to adding Twitter authentication to the RPX API, starting today we now provide you with the extended access credentials for users who sign-in via Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Windows LiveID. With these extended access credentials you can do some wonderful things to improve your user's experience like publish items to the Facebook stream, build a Twitter application, or help a user update their status on MySpace.

This is our first step in making it possible for you to build a deeper integration into your application using third party APIs. Just as we've done for authentication with RPX, this summer we will begin offering a set of APIs and tools that make social integration cross provider and simple.

Facebook to Accept OpenIDs on its Website

2009-04-27T14:25:00.000-07:00

Today Facebook announced that it is going to become an OpenID Relying Party (RP) which means that anyone with an OpenID (AOL, Google, MySpace, Yahoo) and Microsoft (in beta) can create and log into a Facebook account using those credentials. This is big news as now one of the largest social networks will be OpenID-enabled.

Since early 2008 we have seen all the major identity providers becoming issuers of OpenIDs (AOL, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and soon Microsoft). By the end of 2008 and early 2009 we started to see an increase in websites accepting users with these OpenIDs to login. As many of you know, JanRain launched its RPX solution to easily enable websites to accept both OpenIDs and proprietary protocols like Facebook Connect and Windows Live IDs. We expect that other large web properties are realizing, like Facebook, that lowering the barrier to login is essential to an enhanced customer experience on their site.

Congrats to the Facebook team!

OpenID Foundation at the RSA Conference

2009-04-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

The OpenID Foundation participated in a full day, industry-wide identity event along with representatives from the Concordia Project, the DataPortability Project, the Information Card Foundation, Liberty Alliance, and OAuth Community.

You can read more information about the event here. JanRain's CTO, Mike Graves, presented the OpenID Foundation's summary of recent OpenID developments. You can see a copy of the OpenID Foundation presentation below.

During the event, a panel of Identity Organizations discussed trends, collaboration, and the future of online identity managment. Panelists included: OAuth: Eric Sachs; OpenID Foundation: Brian Kissel (Chair); Concordia Project: Eve Maler (Chair); DataPortability Project: Trent Adams; Information Card Foundation: Paul Trevithick (Chair); Liberty Alliance: Roger Sullivan (President); OSIS: Dale Olds (Chair)

OpenID Foundation Update at RSA Conference

View more presentations from bkkissel.

OpenID Case Study: Sulit.com.ph

2009-04-22T09:24:00.001-07:00

Sulit is an online classifieds and e-commerce website for The Philippines. RJ David is the co-founder and technical lead for the site.

RJ, why did Sulit decide to add OpenID registration and login support?

There are a number of reasons why we decided to use OpenID. One of our main goals is to make our website easier for our visitors to use, and this includes our registration and login processes. We want to get more members using our service, and simplifying the registration and login system is a great way to do that.

Also, our top support ticket issue is from members asking how to retrieve their username and/or password. We believe that OpenID can eliminate the need for remembering multiple usernames and passwords, thus making logging in easier for our members.

Why did you choose JanRain’s RPX to implement OpenID?

I had been trying to develop our own implementation of OpenID for quite a while, but I faced some difficulties attempting to support the different implementations of the various identity providers, as well as different versions of the standards. As the technologies in this space continue to expand, I expect more changes in the standards — some providers might follow these changes, while some might maintain old implementation of standards.

Additionally, some popular providers have their own proprietary implementation standards independent of OpenID. RPX provided a single solution that was easy for us to implement while supporting the different standards of the major providers. RPX also allows us to focus on our core business while letting JanRain handle the upgrades to the service when needed.

Here is how great our registration process now appears to visitors:

Did your team know how you would measure success?

Definitely! We can measure success by looking back at the reasons why we wanted to implement OpenID. First, we can measure success by examining how many registrations we have seen since implementing the technology and then comparing that to our figures prior to implementing RPX. Second, we can measure how many support tickets we received asking how to retrieve user login details before and after implementation.

What results you did achieve after deploying RPX?

Before using OpenID, our registration process required a number of steps which included the verification of e-mail addresses, thus forcing potential members to leave the site and check their e-mail. It was also possible for our authentication e-mail to be delivered to a spam folder or deferred by the e-mail service which can often result in failed member registrations. OpenID removed these extra steps, making the entire process simpler. Since implementing RPX in January 2009, we have 64,000 new users and about 10,000 of them registered through RPX.

We have also seen more than a 50% decrease in the amount of support tickets received from users asking about their login details, as they no longer need to remember a separate password for our website when using OpenID.

Any surprises or things you did not expect?

I was personally surprised at how easy it was to implement OpenID using RPX. I actually implemented it in a few hours while waiting for New Year's Eve, which was surprising given that I had been trying to develop our own OpenID implementation for quite a while last year. The development time really will be cut from days/weeks to only a few hours when using JanRain’s RPX solution. Once we implemented RPX, the ease of adding Facebook, MySpace, and recently Windows Live ID to our solution surprised me. I think it only required 10 minutes of my time to enable each of these providers through RPX. I cannot even call it development time since all I need to do is to follow the steps indicated in the tutorial for RPX and I'm done.

We were also surprised by the feedback we got from our members since adding RPX. A majority of our member base is non-technical and we didn't expect them to appreciate this feature. They definitely love the idea of not having to remember as many login details as they use and join more websites.

What advice would you give to others thinking about implementing OpenID and RPX?

Most website owners are constantly looking to make things easier for users through the services that a website provides. OpenID is one great way to give easier and pain-free access to the services on our website. And you do not have to spend lots of man-hours to implement an OpenID solution if you lack the resources. Third party solutions like JanRain’s RPX can help you implement OpenID technology fast and allow you to focus your resources more to the core of your business.

Updated OpenID Library Release

2009-04-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

We would like to announce a security update of the openidenabled.com OpenID
implementations. This release provides important security updates; we recommend that all websites upgrade as soon as possible. This release is API compatible with previous 2.x releases.

The latest releases:

PHP: 2.1.3 -- http://openidenabled.com/php-openid/
Ruby: 2.1.6 -- http://openidenabled.com/ruby-openid/
Python: 2.2.2 -- http://openidenabled.com/python-openid/

For a user-friendly summary of changes in each release, see the
CHANGES file included in the release tarballs. For a complete patch
list, see the CHANGELOG file.

OpenID Foundation Retail Advisory Committee Meeting

2009-04-10T19:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, representatives from JanRain, Yahoo, Google, and Nomura Research Institute (NRI) led a discussion about third party authentication and user-centric identity with representatives from several online retailers. You can see a copy of the presentation

Tatsuki Sakushima of NRI led a case study presentation on Japan Airline's (JAL) use of OpenID and Trusted Data Exchange (TX/CX) for federated identity with hotel and car rental agency partners. JAL saw a 100% increase in partner registrations as a result of the OpenID federated ID deployment. Praveen Alavilli of Amazon endorsed the work of the UX Committee and the User Interface Extension. Brian Kissel reviewed several case studies summarizing the quantitative and qualitative benefits of OpenID and third party authentication.

Relying Party Stats as of April 1st, 2009

2009-04-10T17:02:00.000-07:00

The number of websites that accept OpenID continued to climb throughout March. Now, a shade over 40,000 sites accept OpenID logins. It's remarkable to see how quickly user-centric identity technologies have gained adoption when, as recently as two years ago, less than 5,000 websites were OpenID-enabled. Announcements like the one we made last week (with Microsoft's Windows Live ID added as an identity provider for RPX) only help fuel adoption of OpenID and third party authentication, as website operators begin to take notice of the nearly 1.5 billion accounts that are enabled for OpenID login.

For a directory of some sites that are OpenID-enabled, please visit the myOpenID Site Directory, or the OpenID Directory.

Windows Live ID Added to RPX

2009-04-02T17:30:00.000-07:00

We are excited to announce the addition of Microsoft’s Windows Live ID as an identity provider within RPX. Windows Live ID is a major identity provider, with an active user base of 500 million people through its Hotmail and Windows Live services. Visitors to websites using RPX will now be able to easily login using their Windows Live ID account.

JanRain enjoyed working with the Windows Live ID team to provide website operators and end users a great experience in RPX. Here is some of Microsoft's perspective. With Live ID implemented, website owners will receive a rich user profile upon login that can include addresses, email, first and last name, birthday, display name, anniversary, phone numbers, profile photo, and urls. In addition, websites can even use a co-branded authentication page when their user clicks the "Windows Live ID" button, thus making the login experience that much smoother.

Relying Party Stats as of Mar. 1, 2009

2009-03-16T17:05:00.000-07:00

The number of sites at which you can use your OpenID has continued to grow at a rapid rate. 37,517 websites are now OpenID-enabled. But remember, the actual number of destination sites is quite higher since we count umbrella sites like blogger, wordpress and livejournal as single sites (even though each has thousands of unique blogs that accept OpenID).

We hope that you continue to enjoy using your OpenID, and if you come across a favorite website that doesn’t currently enable OpenID logins, please visit http://demand.openid.net/ and use the simple bookmarklet to request that it become OpenID-enabled.

RPX Wordpress Plugin Now Available

2009-03-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

We have just released the first version of our RPX plugin for Wordpress. The plugin adds RPX based authentication to Wordpress user accounts, as well as for blog commenters.

Plugin Features:

Adds passwordless sign-in and commenting to your blog via OpenID, Google, Yahoo! Facebook, and MySpace based authentication.
Attach a third party sign-in provider to your existing Wordpress account.
Create new accounts without registering and maintaining a password.
Easy to configure with no template modifications required.
Verified identity and provider icons for blog commenters.

Screenshots:

The RPX plugin lets you sign-in using an account from Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, or with an OpenID:

The plugin requires blog commenters to verify themselves with RPX, and displays their provider icon and links to their URL in their comment:

Have a suggestion or feature request for the plugin? Join the conversation on our Wiki or User Voice! Download the plugin.

RPX Wiki provides valuable resource for developers

2009-03-03T09:46:00.000-08:00

We recently launched a wiki (http://rpxwiki.com/) to serve as a resource for developers adding RPX authentication to their website(s). Anyone signed up through RPXnow.com can edit pages on our wiki. Here's a look at the main page:

This is a great resource for developers looking to share tips or tricks for using RPX with any particular language or platform, and the wiki contains several tutorials and recipes for implementing RPX with Python, Ruby, Java or any other language of choice.

Also, be sure to check out a list of some sites using RPX, and feel free to peruse some testimonials from industry experts and stakeholders.

Take a look at our developer wiki, and be sure to bookmark it and check back often as we continue to add more content. Enjoy!

Relying Party Stats as of Feb 1, 2009

2009-02-17T09:59:00.000-08:00

The number of unique relying parties has continued to swell – now to a shade under 35,000 as of February 1st. This means that you, as an end user, can use OpenID to login to 34,980 websites across the internet. And with the continued proliferation of our RPX product (which provides the infrastructure for websites to enable logins using Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Myspace, AOL or other OPs), the number of unique relying parties is only going to continue to escalate.

As you likely already know from reading our blog, JanRain recently added RPX support for Interscope Records, thereby simplifying the registration + login process across Interscope’s blanket of artist websites. We are confident that, as more sites continue to become OpenID enabled through RPX, we’ll see a snowball effect through the “market,” perhaps to the point that a majority of end users will expect to be able to register and login to any website with only two clicks.

New RPX features

2009-02-13T09:11:00.000-08:00

We've added several new features to RPX. The beauty of software as a service is that these features are pushed live and just appear automatically for all our customers, enhancing their RPX experience. Drumroll please....

Localization for the UI Widget. RPX now supports 16 languages (br,de,el,en,es,fr,it,ja,ko,nl,pl,pt,ro,ru,se,zh). We can quickly add other languages, just let us know.

Sync API. We launched new API calls for RPX Pro customers to fetch the latest copy of Facebook & MySpace user data. This is useful to keep the user's profile data fresh even when a user has not logged back into your site. Your marketing team will love this one.

Friends List. A list of user's friend identifiers is now included in the extended payload for Facebook and MySpace. This allows for some pretty cool social graphing on your site.

Testing with Yahoo SREG data. Yahoo is now passing SREG data through to RPX-enabled sites. We are happy to be part of Yahoo's testing, and welcome any feedback.

Basic RP Analytics. You will now see login analytics for each of your websites. Just go to your admin console and you will see a nice pie chart showing the breakdown of identity providers your users are authenticating with.

We have a couple features that are just beginning to roll out to select customers on a beta basis. We are looking for additional sites that also have a need for these features and are willing to give us critical feedback.

Publishing to the Facebook news feed. A simple but useful feature that allows your users to post an entry back to their Facebook feed.

Flash widget. For sites that are entirely Flash, we now have a flash widget which can give you full RPX capability.

We are continuing to work on new and innovative features for RPX customers. If there is anything in particular that you would find a huge benefit for RPX to include, please drop us a line or user our uservoice forum.

Facebook Joins the OpenID Foundation

2009-02-05T17:37:00.000-08:00

I wanted to share some exciting news - today Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation as a sustaining corporate member, joining PayPal who also became a sustaining member last month. There’s a summary of OpenID progress in 2008 and the election of new board members at the OpenID website as well. Luke Shepard from Facebook, Andrew Nash from PayPal, and Joseph Smarr from Plaxo (Comcast) have joined the board of the OpenID Foundation as a result of these developments. This announcement is well timed as website owners have come to expect a good user experience and passing of profile data during the OpenID login experience. The additional support from Facebook, PayPal, and Plaxo reinforces this commitment to website owners. In addition, many of the major OpenID providers have started sharing more user profile data (with the user's consent). We hope you’ll view these as positive developments.

OpenID Case Study: AFI Begin Transmission Project

2009-01-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

We've been building a portfolio of OpenID case studies and just finished one that is pretty exciting, so wanted to share it with the community.

AFI is a leading rock band with an exciting approach to fan engagement - a competition for six fans to perform on their next album.

They asked fans to submit two minute auditions about themselves via YouTube which were then integrated into a dedicated AFI Begin Transmission website, where other fans could comment and vote for their top choices. The final results are being announced today, check it out.

The following is a summary of our conversation with Lee Martin of Aesthetic Theory, who implemented OpenID for AFI.

Lee, why did AFI decide to add OpenID login support?

One of the main focuses of this contest was to make it very simple for fans (and the friends & family) to register, login, comment, and cast their votes. OpenID gave us a quick and easy way to create unique accounts for each fan using identities they already had from Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. It's an open standard and most people already have an OpenID - they just don't know it.

So why did you choose JanRain’s RPX to implement OpenID?

I was looking for a solution that would be intuitive for our fans and easy for me to implement.

RPX has the best user experience that I could find, and we definitely wanted to support Facebook & Myspace which hadn't implemented OpenID yet. I wanted to be able to write a one sentence explanation on "how to login" and I was able to.

Finally, I wanted a turnkey implementation approach that we could get up and running quickly with minimal effort. It literally took me 30 minutes to get RPX integrated and our fans even less time to start voting.

So with RPX we got a killer integrated user experience and a best of class deployment model.

Did your team know how you would measure success?

Success was definitely going to be measured by our customer support inquiries. I haven't seen a single one. The fans, their friends, and their family members simply understood that they were able to login with accounts they already had. The RPX user interface turned out to be very intuitive for our users. They completely got the idea of clicking on the button of an account they already had.

What results did you achieve after deploying OpenID?

We were blown away with the fan response. This contest is less than 2 weeks old and we've received 850 submissions, had 13,000+ fans register on the website, 10,000+ comments, and over 100,000 votes to select our winners. This has been a tremendous event for the band and the fans.

Any surprises, maybe things you didn't expect?

We haven't been active in social media for quite some time so we didn't know what to expect regarding which accounts our fans would choose. AFI has a really broad following, just look at the winners, so we were looking forward to learning more about what accounts were most relevant to them.

We figured MySpace would be a popular choice since we've always seen great traffic from there, but look at that other 65%! There is a pretty broad distribution across Facebook, Yahoo, Google, and AOL as well. This made it even clearer that going with JanRain's RPX was the right choice, since no other solution supported all the accounts with a single integrated, intuitive interface.

What advice would you give to others thinking about implementing OpenID?

DO IT! Users don't want walls in front of them anymore and they trust the authentication efforts of OpenID providers. I was basically able to say "Google wants you to vote on this AFI submission"... you can't buy or build that sort of trust.

And don't let deployment or maintenance stand in your way! RPX makes it fast and easy to implement and I love the fact that as OpenID and other open technologies & services emerge, RPX will just integrate them in and deliver it to us and our fans.

We're also thinking about how to better personalize and engage with our fans by collecting a little bit of opt-in data. We understand that some of the major identity providers are now letting users share information with websites through simple registration (SREG) and attribute exchange (AX) as well as APIs like Facebook Connect and MySpaceID. For future projects we'll be looking at how that might let us serve our fans better.

Why Websites Should Accept Multiple Third Party Identity Account Logins

2009-01-19T22:21:00.000-08:00

There's been some discussion lately about the "competition" between Facebook Connect and OpenID-based third party authentication. From our experience, its in the best interest of most websites to accept multiple third party authentication solutions, since users may prefer to use a wide variety of accounts to facilitate registration and login. Why would you want to tie the success of your website to only one third party identity provider and risk missing some prospective user registrations or not let your users login with their preferred provider?

With JanRain's RPX solution, you can quickly and easily accept registration and login from all the major third party identity services. Additionally, you can accept all the rich user profile data being provided by OpenID Simple Registration (SREG), Attribute Exchange (AX), and provider specific APIs including MySpaceID and Facebook Connect. Read what John McCrea of Plaxo has to say about RPX.

The following are examples from three different websites that validate this perspective.

UserVoice

UserVoice is the online suggestion box that sorts itself. With customers including Sun, Random House, Nokia, Sony BMG, and MySpace, UserVoice is helping its clients get direct customer input on product priorities and build brand loyalty. As you can see, Google happens to be the preferred identity provider for UserVoice's customers, but if they chose to only accept Google, they'd be missing 50% of the users who prefer to use another account.

Interscope Records

Interscope Geffen A&M is a major force in global music, developing chart-topping artists across a wide range of musical genres including rock, rap, pop and alternative. Interscope Geffen A&M Records is a division of Universal Music Group, the world’s leading music company. While Facebook is currently the most preferred identity provider, 57% of Interscope's users prefer to use other identity providers.

Sulit.com.ph

Sulit is an online retailer for both buyers and sellers in the Philippines, like eBay. They wanted a quick and easy way to accept third party registration and login on their website. As you can see, Yahoo is the identity provider of choice, yet another 36% preferred using other providers.

AFI Begin Transmission

The Band AFI recently invited its fans to submit auditions via YouTube to perform on the their next album. They needed a quick and easy way to allow all their fans to comment on the submissions and vote for their favorites. As you can see, MySpace was the identity provider of choice, yet another 64% preferred using other providers.

acroBabble
acroBabble is an online collaborative word game that started in the mid 90's with an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) game run by a bot called "Acrobot." Since then its had many incarnations and now is run as a dedicated game site. As you can see, AOL, Yahoo, and Google all have over 20% share, but there's still another 23% from other providers.

So as you can see, if you want to reach the broadest audience and serve your customers according to their preferences, offering a wide range of third party authentication options may be the best way to go.

Relying Party Stats as of Jan 1st, 2009

2009-01-02T08:16:00.000-08:00

31,185 -- That's how many unique web sites are OpenID enabled (as seen from MyOpenID.com) as 2008 ended. The actual number of destination sites is probably higher since we count umbrella sites like blogger & livejournal as single sites, even through they each have thousands unique blogs that each accept OpenID. 31K is a healthy increase over the 9.6K sites we started the year with. I predict we'll leave 31k in the dust in 2009.

In 2008 we saw Yahoo & Google become OP's, joining AOL in enabling their massive user base to use their existing account as an OpenID. MySpace and Microsoft have announce that they will also OpenID enable their user base in 2009. We are approaching a point where a website can assume their end-user probably has an OpenID. In late 2008, we introduced RPX, which greatly reduces the engineering required to take OpenID. Watch out internet, (Billions of users) + (Easy way for them to register and login)!

Dailymotion Accepts OpenID

2008-12-22T08:00:00.000-08:00

Dailymotion, the world's largest independent video sharing site with over 38 million unique monthly viewers, announced that it has added support for OpenID to enable its millions of users to use their OpenID to initiate and simplify registration on Dailymotion or link their OpenID to an existing Dailymotion account. This is an exciting announcement as evidence of another large website enhancing its user experience and simplifying the registration and login process by accepting OpenIDs. JanRain enjoyed working with the Dailymotion product team during their implementation and look forward to hearing about their success in using OpenID. To read more about this news, check out the press release.

I registered on Dailymotion.com using myOpenID and it was a solid experience as they brought over some profile data (age, country) to accelerate setting up my account. They also allowed me to easily delete the OpenID I had associated with my Dailymotion account and add a different OpenID provider. The return login experience is one click away as they pre-populate my OpenID login box with the one I have set for my account.

Today there are about 30,000 websites that accept OpenIDs and that number is growing at double digit growth rates each month. Some recent sites that just became OpenID enabled include MapQuest, UserVoice, and Interscope Records.

RPX addresses User Experience and Profile Data Requests

2008-12-16T10:43:00.001-08:00

A lot has been happening with OpenID in the last couple of months. There are now over 30,000 OpenID-enabled sites and over 600 million OpenID-enabled user accounts, with another 400M+ coming from Microsoft LiveID accounts soon. MapQuest went live with OpenID and CitySearch announced its plans to roll out OpenID shortly.

Last week both the Interscope division of Universal Music Group and UserVoice went live with RPX.

Rick Turoczy of ReadWriteWeb wrote a good blog post on the UMG launch. Read about their plan to rollout OpenID across 200 artist websites.

UserVoice has a very intuitive OpenID implementation that even allows you to link an OpenID to a detected legacy account. In addition, UserVoice wrote a blog post on RPX. OpenID was the second most requested enhancement for their website.

At the OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting in NYC earlier this year, two of the major requests were for (1) improved user experience and (2) more user profile data. Many of you provided subsequent feedback on how to improve the UX which has been incorporated into RPX. We hope you’ll take a look at the RPX UX on Interscope and UserVoice and share your feedback.

Working closely with all the major OpenID Providers as well as Facebook, the RPX team has done its best to leverage all the user profile data that is available for website operators. RPX just added MySpace support last week. Here’s the list of current data that is available to relying parties from some of the major 3rd party providers via RPX. This will allow Relying Parties to instantaneously build rich user profiles leveraging existing information from other accounts.

AOL: country, postal-code, birthday, email, gender, preferred-username, url

Google: verified email, with more data expected soon

Facebook: about_me, activities, affiliations, birthday, books, current_location, education_history, first_name, hometown_location, hs_info, interest, last_name, locale, meeting_for, meeting_sex, movies, music, name, notes_count, political, profile_url, proxied_email, quotes, relationship_status, religion, sex, significant_other_id, status, timezone, tv, wall_count, work_history

MySpace: aboutMe, age, bodyType, books, children, currentLocation, dateOfBirth, drinker, emails, ethnicity, gender, hasApp, heroes, interests, jobs, lookingFor, movies, name, familyName, networkPresence, nickname, profileSong, profileUrl, religion, sexualOrientation, status, tvShows, urls, photos

Yahoo: SREG support is currently in test mode with two partners (JanRain and Plaxo). We expect their data portions to go live soon with email, nickname, fullname, language, postal-code, email, gender

Here's what some of the major providers are saying about RPX:

Max Engel of MySpace: “JanRain offers a service to help sites easily get going with portable identity solutions by handling the ‘UI, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data for your website.’ It is a great complement to MySpaceID, by offering compatibility with our identity platform. As a developer, this can help you easily get going with our platform while letting JanRain handle much of the heavy lifting with their excellent product offering. We're excited to be integrated into the product as of last week, and have been collaborating to help provide the developer community with a better experience.”

Luke Shepard of Facebook on what will drive OpenID adoption: “Easy tutorials, developer examples, and videos are great. Fantastic, up-to-date, and usable libraries are even better. Easy-install plugins (like MovableType) and full-scale solutions like RPX are the best.”

George Fletcher of AOL: “JanRain's recent release of RPX Basic is the first public offering of OpenID RP SaaS. This will make it a lot easier for many sites to integrate OpenID into their existing content and services and provide their features to a greater audience. I believe this is an important development in the adoption of OpenID and am hopeful that standards will develop around this capability.”

We’ve also created case studies highlighting the successes that some organizations have had implementing OpenID:

PropertyMaps – “We deployed OpenID in January of this year and saw registrations increase by 200%. Currently about 25% of our registrations occur via OpenID. As more major OpenID providers like MySpace come online, and as consumers become more familiar with OpenID, we expect to see these numbers increase as well. An example of this is when Yahoo's implementation came online in February, we saw a surge of user registrations.”

Mixx.com – “We've seen a ten-fold increase in registrations via OpenID and third-party services. We've also observed a 20% increase in registrations from direct and referrer traffic.”

Stackoverflow – “We launched our public beta in late September, with one authentication method: OpenID. Within a few weeks all of our registered site users, about 10,000 so far, were logging in via OpenID.”

Get Satisfaction – “We launched OpenID in July of 2008. OpenID utilization varies by client. Clients with younger, more tech-savvy customers see faster adoption and usage. For example, Twitter and Songbird are experiencing utilization of up to 20% or more.

37Signals – “Our main reason was to get single sign-on (SSO) across our products. OpenID gave us a quick and easy way to link accounts with one master identity, an OpenID. It's an open standard, getting an OpenID is quick and easy, and OpenID allows people to use one identity to login across all of our products and thousands of public websites. We launched OpenID in March 2008 with Highrise. About 15% of the logins on are now using OpenID.”

If you have time for a 15 minutes for a webinar, we can give you a brief demo of how RPX works and answer any questions you may have. We’d also like to get more feedback from you on how to improve user experience, user profile data, or other aspects of OpenID to meet your needs.