Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

Friday, January 18, 2008

Blogger Becomes an OpenID Provider

After allowing you to authenticate your comments using an OpenID, Blogger is now an OpenID provider. To use any of your blogs as an OpenID identity, you need to check "Enable OpenID for blogs" in your Blogger profile (the feature is still experimental, so it's not added in the public release yet) and save the settings.

Blogger inserts this line in the head section of your template:

<link rel="openid.server" href="http://draft.blogger.com/openid-server.g" />

so now you can use any of your blogs as an OpenID. Some simple things you can do with your OpenID are to claim your blog at Technorati (you still need a Technorati account), sign in using your OpenID at Plaxo, Zoomr or post comments in a LiveJournal blog, like Brad Fitzpatrick's blog. A small inconvenience is that Blogger uses the subdomain of your blog instead of your name.

Yesterday, Yahoo announced it will support OpenID 2.0 (Blogger is a provider for OpenID 1.1), so the future is bright for this authentication system.

Labels: Blogger

13 comments ( Post a comment )

lctkw said on January 18, 2008 3:54 AM PDT:

This is interesting.

However, with so many existing services moving to support OpenID, the original problem of having too many login accounts resurfaces - I have a LiveJournal, Yahoo and Blogger account, so I have more than enough OpenIDs to use. It would be great if there was some way to unify all these IDs, sort of a one ID to rule them all thing? Sounds a bit of a security risk, though.

As it is though, I find the practical applications of OpenID still somewhat limited... It's great to be able to comment on other blogs/services without having to register, but that's about as much use as I see for it right now.

domenico said on January 18, 2008 5:17 AM PDT:

since Blogger can work with Google Accounts we may say that Google is an OpenID provider

Kerub said on January 18, 2008 5:26 AM PDT:

but you need to be logged in blogspot, is not it?

so it would be difficult to use simultaneously more that a blogspot openid.

Armand said on January 18, 2008 6:27 AM PDT:

That's great but there are indeed many OpenID providers and yet very few sites that support OpenID for login.
Blogger does both, so +1 for Google.

Mike said on January 18, 2008 6:31 AM PDT:

lctkw , there's no overload - just more options. There's no need at all to utilize more than one OpenID (unless you want to) so you can just ignore the other providers.

elinfonet said on January 18, 2008 6:01 PM PDT:

Opino más o menos lo mismo que lctkw.

[...]Vía | Google Operating System[...]

Everymatter said on January 18, 2008 7:50 PM PDT:

i think it will increase competition between yahoo and google

chep said on January 19, 2008 6:19 AM PDT:

That's great! let's try how it works first of all writing a comment here.

hehehehe

guldook said on January 20, 2008 5:02 PM PDT:

Great, but I want also a delegation function.

e-Apwn said on January 22, 2008 6:58 AM PDT:

What exactly is an Open ID Blogger and an open ID provider?
thank you.
I stumbled upon this page looking for details how to find or create themes and backgrounds for my personal blog...

jetxee said on February 7, 2008 1:47 AM PDT:

Great!

I tried it, and it works. No need to do OpenID delegation anymore.

I have also translated this instructions into Russian:
Использование «родного» OpenID в Blogger, без делегации.

talesfromthedadside said on March 13, 2008 8:45 AM PDT:

I'll test it here as well.

yeowthong said on April 13, 2008 3:52 PM PDT:

Cool

What do you think?