OpenID Visibility Brings Third Party Applications

With so many big names jumping on the OpenID band wagon and lending the identity application credibility, it's no wonder third party applications are already springing up to take advantage of the surge. Some of these applications are existing ones that are simple adding features from the OpenID API. Some of them capitalize on ideas that were already out there and some try hard to be new (no easy feat in this Web 2.0 age where everything seems to have already been done to death).

One third party application that recently popped up on my radar is Openvatar. This application seems to be a Gravatar clone that simply adds OpenID functionality to the idea. Gravatar has been around for a while, while Openvatar is still in alpha phase. It seems that Gravatar would have capitalized on their name recognition by beating Openvatar to the punch of adding OpenID capabilities, but they haven't yet.

Openvatar seems redundant on more than one level. Not only is it doing something Gravatar already does, just with a different identifying ID, it is offering a service that OpenID itself already offers. If you have an OpenID with any of the major OpenID sites, you already have an OpenID avatar on file to show (or not show) as you wish. If this third party application is redundant, are there any that are useful or fresh that have popped up?

The answer, so far, is not really. OpenId has benefits and drawbacks - the benefit of having (supposedly) one ID to use for many web sites is simplicity. The main drawback is that once a hacker or phisher discovers your OpenId, they have access to every site you use it on. That creates obvious issues. Instead of designing third party applications to handle those issues or make OpenID more functional across more site, we get features like Openvatar and silly applications like Jyte.

What is Jyte? An OpenId referenctial application that offers you the chance to “build cred” around your OpenID. Users can log in to Jyte using their OpenID, make silly claims similar to Twitter posts about what you had for lunch in substance, then vote on their claims and the claims of others. With such pithy claims as “HEH and LOL are equally bad annoying” to vote on, Jyte does little to help OpenID get taken more seriously or become more secure.

One site, Ulitzer, is set to launch as an invite-only web publication portal in June 2008. Featuring qualified articles from top professionals Ulitzer plans to use OpenId technology to get the bylined articles placed in online journals and web publications all over the web in addition to their own site. It isn't clear beyond listing “Creative Commons” licenses with each article what Ulitzer is doing to protect the identities of its OpenId authors from phishers, but at least it's planned application of the technology is more substantial than sites like Openvatar and Jyte.

It seems clear to me that people still aren't taking OpenID seriously, in spite of the public relations boost gleaned from Google, Microsoft, IBM and Yahoo signing on. Rife with security issues and misunderstood by the general, less tech savvy internet populace, OpenID's cause is not helped by trite applications and poor sign in services. I'll be following the emergence of more OpenId thrid party applications over the coming months, and I'd love to hear from you if you are creating, or have created, a third party application for OpenID technology I can look at.