OpenID Gets Political Support from Barack Obama

It is a much-discussed problem that OpenID still lacks support from the biggest players in the internet industry: while everyone admits that the concept of OpenID will only be efficient when a person will really be able to login to absolutely any website using the OpenID credentials he already has instead of creating a login and password everywhere. Yet the biggest players still prefer to serve as providers of OpenID offering their user credentials for their users to login on the sites supporting OpenID - instead of allowing users to login to their services without creating accounts using OpenID credentials they get elsewhere.

These examples are numerous - MySpace, AOL, Yahoo!, LiveJournal are all the examples of the same rather closed approach to OpenID. The latest example was Google introducing an interesting iteration of the OpenID concept of their own instead of using the general approach - they offer to use Gmail accounts as OpenID credentials and website owners will have to add Login with Google to the usual Login with OpenID option if they want to support Google’s OpenID.

Yet now we see one of the biggest victories for OpenID as Barack Obama’s transition website, Change.gov, has announced support of OpenID for its users. I think the support of the President Elect Barack Obama is probably the best thing that could ever happen to the OpenID concept and its proponents. After all, when you have a supporter this powerful it is way much easier to persuade everyone else that what you are doing is truly a valuable thing.

Starting from Tuesday of this week visitors to Change.gov can login to the site using their OpenID credentials they got from numerous OpenID providers to leave a comment on a dedicated section of the site. The only problem here is that the majority of the content available on the site, including blog posts, is not available for a comment while users are invited to comment in special sections of the site specifically intended for such discussions.

It now looks like such dedicated pages will be launched gradually for various issues of public concern and as of now you can engage in discussions with other visitors on the health care policy page. As of writing this, the page already has over two and a half thousand comments. But while I would not connect this huge number of comments with the fact that comments are easy to leave on the site with IntenseDebate (featuring OpenID login) and the majority of the people willing to leave a comment, would probably do so anyway even if they had to register to do so, I still think it is a great move both making the future administration more open and helping the idea of OpenID. To me even allowing comments anywhere on the site to let visitors engage in discussions on such important issues is a great thing to do in itself - and letting visitors avoid the hideous registration process is twice as great.

But to me this is also another proof of the fact that Barack Obama will be very favorable to technology-related industries, internet included, and some projects may even receive governmental support - even if it does not come as far as funding, at least they will get tons of extra visibility and popularity. After all, Obama’s weekly addresses on YouTube are already very popular (and they used to be radio-only for years) and now OpenID and IntenseDebate both get a significant publicity boost. I wonder what project will be the next lucky one.