Finally, OpenID for Google Accounts
Google has just announced that it is allowing OpenID for ALL of it's user accounts.
It's weird though since it is calling it Federated Login when in fact it really should state the fact it is is enabling OpenID (I had to double check just to make sure it was). Over on the Google Code Blog however, they're being a bit more technical :-) and actually saying so - Google Moves Towards Single Sign on with OpenID.
Overall, this is great news. Yes, Blogger has allowed OpenID for a while and there was that little test with Google App Engine, but this is what we've wanted for a long time.
There are very few companies now who don't accept OpenID and very few of the big ones (with lots of users) who don't provide OpenID.
So hopefully in the near future you'll just need one OpenID, and therefore one password, to log in to as many sites as you use. Of course, you'll be able to have as many OpenIDs as you want but that's your choice.
There seems to be some interesting things going on with each of the new people accepting Google Accounts by their email address rather than traditionally by their OpenID URLs. I suspect that this is just a predefined step over the first contact the website consumer has to do when first contacting the provider. I'll probably post further into why this is happening another time.
But anyway, that's beside the point.
Now all we need to do is make Google, Yahoo! AOL and all the others accept OpenIDs!
It's a long slow road, but we're eventually getting there.
This post originated on http://chilts.org/.
Email me on andychilton -at- gmail -dot- com.