Today Google announced a single sign-on solution that is powered by OpenID. This is certainly a fantastic bit of news, and comes on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement of their intention to support the standard. In addition, Chris Messina wrote an excellent post yesterday on how we can overcome the usability problems that have marred OpenID to help the spec succeed, and how e-mail address support is critical to the success of the standard.

I completely agree on the importance of enabling e-mails as a valid OpenID, and believe that we should ultimately empower the user to enable the identifier he or she most strongly identifies with. At MySpace, we are uniquely positioned to work with OpenID because we have a user-base that already thinks of themselves as being represented by a URL. If you ask any MySpace user what their vanity URL is, there is a very good chance they’ll know it. However, beyond us and the blogging community, most users from major OP’s don’t know what their URL is, even if many of them actually already possess an OpenID. That is why, even with the excitement around Microsoft becoming an OP, a user with a valid OpenID doesn’t equal a user leveraging their OpenID. It is this disconnect that e-mail-based OpenID can help to alleviate. Further, we need to be flexible enough to include other identifiers that might emerge, such as cell phone numbers.

It is this eventual freedom to use the identifier you identify with as your OpenID that necessitates that the foundation take a more proactive role in marketing. It is only once the brand has been strengthened that users will understand that their URL, e-mail, or type foo identifier is something special. people know they have a credit card number, and they know who gives it to them, even if they aren’t being expressly asked for their “Visa” or “Mastercard”. we need that type of recognition.

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