Wow and Flutter

I had a great time today at Day Two of the Internet Identity Workshop. I attended most of the OpenID-related sessions, covering OpenID Authentication 2.0, OpenID Attribute Exchange, and OpenID Assertion Quality Extension.

Apart from listening to the really smart and personable people presenting, what I really enjoyed most was the Unconference structure. This is my first Unconference and I am really loving the amount of interactivity and idea exchange that comes along with it.

What I took away from today's sessions, at a very high level, was an increased conviction that OpenID really has it right. While extensions like Attribute Exchange and Assertion Quality are important and will make OpenID even more attractive to end-users, OpenID is first and foremost about authentication. And the great news is, OpenID authentication works today- this isn't a spec with a real-soon-now implementation- the implementations are out there now.

I've explained the user benefits of OpenID authentication to several of my non-technical friends and they all got it immediately. That's a great sign that, given a critical mass of sites that can use OpenID for authentication, the end users are ready and willing to move to these new user-centric digital identities.

I had a great discussion with Scott Kveton of JanRain today, talking about how sites with existing user databases can adopt OpenID and allow federation between existing accounts and OpenID identifiers. Based on that discussion, I hope to add OpenID support to Lingr very soon.

Tomorrow, I'm looking forward to Dick Hardt's talk on OpenID roadmap, as well as a talk by Joseph Smarr on integration of OpenID into sites with existing user databases.