I was just in the WordPress IRC channel a few minutes ago when I noticed Matt Mullenweg was in the room, so I randomly posed an OpenID question that’s been bugging me for a while:
- SignpostMarv
/me wonders if its a good time to ask about OpenLD consumer support on WP.com
- photomatt
we’ll get consumer support eventually
- SignpostMarv
photomatt: Q1/Q2 2008 ?
- photomatt
SignpostMarv: most likely, depends on some other factors
- SignpostMarv
photomatt: can I get a response on my hypothetical of one of reasons that the rollout of consumer support has taken so long ?
I’d previously theorised that one of the delays could be making a decision on whether to just use OpenID for comment signing, or to create local accounts on wordpress.com
- photomatt
SignpostMarv: no user domand
- SignpostMarv
will automattic be making the wp.com openid consumer create local accounts, or just for the purposes of automating comment signing
- photomatt
SignpostMarv: probably just comment signing
So the basic gist seems to be that:
- OpenID Consumer support on WordPress.com hasn’t been much of a priority because there hasn’t been enough demand
- Assuming demand doesn’t spike, it’ll probably be rolled out in the first half of 2008
- It’ll only be used for comment signing, not for creating local accounts on WordPress.com
What this means for Second Life users
If WordPress.com were to support OpenID Consumer, Resident would be able to sign comments as themselves without needing to create an account on WordPress.com, or by leaving pseudo-anonymous comments (which of course, any name can be used with). Signing comments with OpenID would allow Residents to sign comments on the official SL blog and the recently launched VTeam Blog, without having to worry so much about someone else pretending to be them.
While Linden Lab are working on their own OpenID server, I’ve already got an OpenID server for Second Life Residents released, SLOpenID. While SLOpenID doesn’t use the same password as your Second Life account (for obvious reasons), it does use the same name- for example: http://my.slopenid.net/signpostmarv-martin/ . SLOpenID is also presented as my partial vision of how Linden Lab’s “My.SecondLife.com” project should be implemented- e.g. using public profiles (whose content and layout are controlled by widgets) as the OpenID urls.
