Rafael Sosa’s Weblog

Web 2.0 has sprung a wide variety of Web Services that can be integrated white label to any website. These sites allow anyone with minimal knowledge of web programming to insert full and complex applications into their sites. I love the freedom this gives and the diversity of tools that can be offered to an existing community in a website. A webmaster now has the ability to choose from a menu of web services. However, one thing is missing – cross integration of the user base. No one wants to sign in, much less sign up ten times on a website – not even twice. When a user signs in to your site, that user should be able to navigate throughout the site always recognized of who he is, able to interact with the site in all those tools. User interactivity is key to building content and fomenting user loyalty.

OpenID comes as a very important component of this integration. Through the use of this technology in all tools, one can authenticate a user and allow them to change from multiple applications all configured to run under one domain. Thus, the user can add comments into the community section powered by Ning. Post videos in the video section powered by Magnify.net. And buy that really cool product advertised through a contextual ad from Ebay – all this done without having to sign in twice.

Once this integration is seamless, typical small and medium websites won’t have a need to worry about difficult server configurations and expensive or custom built applications to do the things we all want to do on the web. Instead, a typical community website will be able to pay $10 for a simple shared hosting space to store a few pictures and files, and then run every other section hosted at the specialized application provider through a CNAME, such as blog.domain.com for their blog run by WordPress (I do that).  The end result is far more efficiency. When I used to run my own blog, on my own server, I had to upgrade that thing many times because of security bugs. When I ran my Vbulletin forum it got hacked because you have to upgrade it all the time also. The amount of energy and time that the process of maintaining applications drains your efforts from what you should be focusing on. For this, once OpenID is in place for all applications, many webmasters will sleep better.