Scott Blomquist

One thing that concerns many people about OpenID is what happens if their provider goes out of business or if they want to switch to another provider for some other reason.

At Vidoop, we believe that users deserve to always be in control of their online identity, even if it means that they’d like to switch away. We’ll let them keep their URL and change to another provider.

We recently shipped a feature that allows a user to go to the Account/Advanced tab on our site and delegate their myVidoop.com OpenID URL to the OpenID provider of their choice. For example, right now, if you type sblom.myvidoop.com in to one of your favorite OpenID relying party’s web site, you’ll see that you’re redirected to openid.xmpp.za.net.

All OpenID users should expect their OpenID providers to do the same. Please ask them to do so–even if you’re happy with them now. What if they go out of business, or if you decide that you like another provider better?

I love some of the kookier OpenID authentication schemes that are out there.

Here’re a few examples of what I mean:

1. http://www.jkg.in/openid/ — Does not do authentication at all. Anyone can claim any URL as their own. I call it "OpenID with null authentication".
2. http://openid.xmpp.za.net/ — Sends a message to your Jabber (XMPP) account to confirm that it was you that made the OpenID request.
3. http://www.myvauthid.com/ — If it’s even real (can’t connect to it tonight), it’s apparently an OpenID provider that uses voice print to authenticate you. My cell phone isn’t consistent enough for this sort of thing to even work.

I talked to Dr. M. H. Samadzadeh‘s software engineering class at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK today.

I’ve posted my slides. If you heard the talk, I’m eager to hear any feedback that you may have.