How will OpenID providers make money? Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Paul Lomax, who I met last week at Geek Dinner, was at the Future of Web Apps conference and has done a good write up of some of the talks.
His post on OpenID caught my eye and in particular he noted that The Times newspaper had reported on the various announcements about the launch of OpenID services but had described it terms of competition.
As I noted on his blog, I think the Times is right in choosing to describe the scramble as competition, since I shall only need one OpenID provider. Ultimately, winning customers to your OpenID service should be far stickier than many other types of offering on the web. Microsoft saw this long ago with their passport service but lost out, I believe, because many companies were fearful of playing with Microsoft.
What OpenID providers can do with those customers when they get them is less clear. They will clearly have lots of data about the services that you are using, which they may be able to exploit (worth checking what the T&Cs say).
I don't think OpenID providers will have much opportunity to extract "access" charges from services that their customers connect to, as some business models have sought to do. Nor do I think they have any particular advantages in trying to sell their customers other services.
It's possible these businesses may be funded by advertising because it's often the case that you need to be logged into your openid provider when accessing services, or it certainly seems to be the case with Livejournal who have operated OpenId services for some time. Hence, I need to keep going back to the livejournal site.
But I still wonder what the business model is.
Labels: OpenID
posted by John Wilson @ 8:33 PM Permanent Link
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How to use OpenID Thursday, January 25, 2007
Simon Willison, formerly of Yahoo and an evangelist for OpenID has a good explanation of how to use OpenId here in a screencast.
As its says on the opening screen
OpenID lets you log in to different sites without having to create a new username and password for each one.
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posted by John Wilson @ 1:41 AM Permanent Link
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OpenID and Portable Social Networks Sunday, January 21, 2007
Brian Oberkirch has an excellent analysis on Open ID and how it has the potential to create portable social networks, which would aggregate our identity, activity and friends from the many "islands" on which we are registered into a consolidated entity. The post contains some interesting ideas on how LinkedIn might benefit from this area.
posted by John Wilson @ 10:05 PM Permanent Link
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