Not to be outdone by Yahoo's recent OpenID announcement, Google has announced that Blogger URLs can now be used as OpenID identities. With two very large announcements back to back, OpenID availability is fast approaching critical mass.
To use the new Blogger OpenID support you'll need to be using the beta version of Blogger and you'll have to enable the new features in the user profile section. Once you do that, any time you encounter a site that accepts OpenID, just plugin in your Blogger or Blogspot domain address and you'll be able to login.
Blogger's OpenID support isn't entirely new, the service already allowed OpenID as a means of authenticating when posting a comment on a blog.
In other words, Blogger's support is now two-way, providing a URL for logging in elsewhere and also accepting OpenID URLs as a way to login to Blogger (at least in the comments). On the other hand, Yahoo's forthcoming service will only provide an OpenID.
Of course Yahoo is aware of the shortcomings in its OpenID support. Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny acknowledges the lack of two-way support, saying that he hopes the company will eventually become an OpenID consumer as well as provider.
He also suggests that Yahoo might eventually adopt OAuth, another key component of the open social web.
It's worth noting another significant difference between Google's new OpenID support and Yahoo's forthcoming support: Google has opted to use the OpenID 1.1 spec while Yahoo's service will use OpenID 2.0. Hopefully consuming sites (the ones you login to with an OpenID) will accept both specs, since no one wants to see OpenID get lost in the versioning forest that threatened other much-touted and now-ubiquitous tools like RSS.
If you've got a Blogger account and you've enable the new features, head over to the MyOpenID's list of OpenID-enabled sites to try out your new identity.
Update: I made a small change to the wording around Zawodny's quote above to clarify that those are his opinions, not an official Yahoo statement. That said, as we noted yesterday, Yahoo's OpenID support will launch as a beta, during which the company plans to gather user feedback and determine how it's going to further support OpenID in the future. So, if you want Yahoo to be an OpenID consumer as well as provider, be sure to let them know
[via Google Operating System]
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