Consolidating Your Online Identity in 15 Easy Minutes

skairam — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 22:01:53 +0000

This is a quick tutorial (told as a story – with pictures!) on what OpenID is, how to host your own, and how to use it to log into websites.

Yesterday, I was signing up for a new service, and noticed the increasingly familiar option to “Sign in with OpenID”:

OpenID Sign-in Box

For those of you not familiar with OpenID, the idea is that instead of re-entering profile information every time you sign up for a new site on the web (which, if you are like me, happens fairly frequently), you have a single place to consolidate your online identity. You can find a more detailed explanation here at OpenID.net.

Anyways, that idea sounded great to me, so I started to think: Which OpenID do I use? I know I have one through Google, and I know I have one through Yahoo. Wait, I have one through Flickr, too? Isn’t that part of Yahoo? How many of these do I already have?

Surprise! You may already have like a dozen OpenID's!

Considering that my goal in exploring OpenID was to consolidate my online identity, I definitely found myself more confused now. And so, I turned to Twitter:

Help me, Twitter!

I included @chrismessina in there as he is a member of the OpenID elite who is really great at responding to community questions about online identity. He was quick to reply, saying:

“Use your own domain as your OpenID”? Interesting. I decided to check this out and found out that it’s pretty easy, and now I am logging into websites with the OpenID: “http://sanjaykairam.com/”, which feels pretty cool. Here were the steps I went through to get there (and I’m not kidding that it took about 15 minutes).

1. Sign up with an OpenID provider.

Because a lot of my confusion came from the fact that I had an OpenID through sites where I already had accounts, I thought it made sense to choose a provider that was strictly dedicated to providing OpenID’s for use across the net. Some examples of these are MyOpenID, ClaimID, MyID.net, etc. I decided to go with ClaimID, as I had heard of it before (and something about the name resonated with my current goal).

I signed up, and soon learned that ClaimID has another goal: being your ‘link resume’ on the internet. By this, I mean, as a single location for consolidating identity information, they also give you a page to add links to pages on the web that pertain to you. This isn’t that exciting for me, as my name is basically unique on the Internet (Google: Sanjay Kairam for my link resume), but for someone with a common name, I can see how this would be a great way to collect the links that are REALLY about you. Anyways, I spent a couple minutes collecting some links, and you can see my ClaimID profile here. This feature, in addition to using this profile to log in to websites, really struck me as a great stride towards consolidating my online identity.

2.Delegate my OpenID

My next step was to add a snippet of code on my website that would set my website up as a delegate. All this means is that when I sign up for a service with OpenID, that service will ping my website for my information, and the code snippet tells it to look for that information at ClaimID. My snippet (which you insert in the element was just:

Easy enough, right?

3. Sign in with my domain as my OpenID

That’s it! Now I was ready to sign in to a new website with my domain. I wanted to try a new website for which I didn’t already have an account, so I picked Menuism, a sort of restaurant review wiki site. I clicked the “OpenID login” button and entered my website address:

It's no surprise to me, I am my own identity.

When I hit “Login with OpenID”, I was redirected to the ClaimID page. Here, I was asked to fill out any information requested by the website that wasn’t already present in my ClaimID profile:

After entering that information there, I hit “Log In” (if anyone happens to know what the difference is between “Log In” and “Log In and Trust”, do add in the comments!), and was redirected back to Menuism.com:

Wait, I have to enter my email again?

So the process doesn’t seem entirely streamlined yet – for instance, Menuism asked me for my email address again, even though I thought they’d already asked for it in the previous screen. However, it wasn’t too painful, and when I finished log-in, I was now logged in to Menuism with an OpenID provided through my own website.

I hope this was helpful to some of you who, like me, were a little confused about how to consolidate their identity information online. I am still learning about the costs and benefits of using OpenID, so if anyone has information to add, we’d love to hear from you in the comments!

Sanjay Kairam » openID

Consolidating Your Online Identity in 15 Easy Minutes