Month after month we have been revising the filtering used to determine the unique our RP count. We generally uncover several patterns a month, that left uncaught, would cause a single site to be counted as more than one RP. The poster child for such a pattern is blogger.com, as described we described in May. Additional filtering, of course, gets applied all the way back to the first day we launched myopenid.com, causing the entire graph to get revised slighted downward.
However, this month is the exception. Instead of a retroactive downward revision, we have a fairly significant upward revision. How is this possible? This is a very good question, and it had me scratching my head for a bit this morning. It turns out that we were overly aggressive in filtering trust roots that had explicit ports 80 and 443. That is, realms such as http://pibb.com:80 or https://*.jyte.com:443 were not being counted.
Although the number of sites accepting OpenID is still a small fraction of the web, the trend here is obvious.
Demand OpenID! is a new service which enables you to demand OpenID login support from websites you visit everyday. It’s a simple website and bookmarklet that provides a “one click call to action” for requesting support at your favorite websites.
How does it work? After you sign in for the first time, you’ll be given a bookmarklet to add to your web browser. Later, when you visit a website that asks you to log in and you wish it had OpenID support, just click the bookmarklet to have your vote recorded on the Demand OpenID website. Take a look at the demands for OpenID on Twitter. The service is unique in that it requires a user to log in with their OpenID, and publicly displays their votes on the website. It shows that these are people who have OpenIDs, and want to usethem at websites across the internet.
One of the most useful statistics to track the growth of OpenID is the count of Relying Parties (web sites that accept OpenID). Since launching myopenid.com nearly three years ago, we have been able to provide a fairly decent view of the RP landscape. Two and half years ago it was like Christmas every time a new site appeared. Whereas today we regularly see a 100 new unique sites a day.
Since we started providing these numbers, we’ve taken a conservative approach in what we call an RP. We strip out what appears to be purely dev testing. Anything with localhost, .local, ports other than 80 & 443 gets tossed. We also consolidate obvious related trustroots into one. For example sites like 37 signals, wetpaint and others, create many unique trustroots (which is perfectly valid), but for a truth in numbers sake we don’t count these as a separate 1000 sites, we count them as 1. Sometimes these patterns aren’t immediate obvious and we retroactively add them to a filter list. This can cause the RP count to be adjusted slightly downward over time.
At the end of April there were 13196 RP’s. At current rates, this number doubles before the kids go back to school in the fall, but I suspect we will be at a steeper growth curve before that time (more on this in another post).
JanRain releases code for accepting self-issued InfoCards
Today we released an important piece of code to help enable web applications accept Microsoft Information Cards. It’s a Python library and PostgreSQL database interface that uses libxmlsec and OpenSSL. This code does not depend on any Web framework, and the database implementation should be easy to generalize. The library is available under a BSD license.
Though the library is only available in Python, it could be used as a reference implementation for those wanting to implement Information Card verification in other languages. The project is available here:
This is a notice that myOpenID will be having a maintenance
outage starting at 14:00 on 2008/02/03, US Pacific Time
(GMT -7 hours). The outage may last as long as 60 minutes,
but is expected to be considerably shorter.
The reason for this outage is:
Network modifications to enable new services
During the outage, the myOpenID website may be unavailable or
unresponsive, and users will be unable log into OpenID-enabled
websites using their MyOpenID accounts. The latest information about
this and other myOpenID events can always be found on
http://janrain.com/blog/
We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions, please
contact us at support@myopenid.com.
With OpenID backinthe news, it is logical for people new to the technology to ask ‘Where can I learn more about OpenID?’ Well there are many resources out there for anyone wishing to learn about OpenID and we will go over a few of them here…
A great way to learn about OpenID is in person. The first event I attended for JanRain was BarCampPortland and it was incredible. Among other highlights I was thoroughly educated about OpenID. I was able to ask questions in the ad-hoc sessions and then follow up with fellow attendees as the event progressed.
If you will be in the San Francisco area in the very near future there is an OpenIDDevCamp coming up this weekend, January 11-January 13, 2008 at Six Apart. You can find more information on the event at the OpenID foundation blog or on Upcoming. Don’t worry if you can not attend, there are BarCamp like events being held all over the world and notes from this event will be posted in the OpenID channel on Pibb.
Interested in learning about OpenID before you jump into a *Camp event? Then you are in luck, there are a plethora of online resources available for anyone wishing to learn more about this great technology:
myOpenID is JanRain’s public OpenID provider service. As the largest independent site for establishing an OpenID on the internet, myOpenID.com has been online for two years and continues to grow with the spread of OpenID. myOpenID has been built with a focus of providing its members with features that enhance reliability, security, and usability.
Prominent features include:
Choice of authentication methods including password, Microsoft CardSpace, and Client Certificates.
and we are happy to announce these great new features:
You can now personalize your myOpenID identity page. Upload your own avatar that will be passed to sites that ask using the Pavatar protocol, choose from a (small, but growing) selection of skins, or scrape your identity page to pull out your information in hCard, and MicroID formats
You will also notice that your personas page has a new look as well as some new features. Support has been added for OpenID Attribute Exchange, and for adding URLs. This makes it easy to share links to your blog or other websites by showing them on your identity page or passing them along with Attribute Exchange.
1. You will learn everything there is to know about what is going on in the identity space…
OK, so I exaggerate, more likely you will learn how much you don’t know. Internet Identity Workshop is a bi-yearly event that “focuses on user-centric identity and identity in the large. It is a working meeting for a range of groups focused on the technical, social and legal issues arising with the emerging identity layer of the web.”
This year it will be held December 3-5 2007 at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum. Its not too late to register!
I had been working for JanRain for a couple weeks when I attended IIW 2007a and it was an awesome experience. I posted notes from many of sessions I attended on Pibb. At the end I knew more about all the different facets of identity (online/offline) than I could have ever imagined and made some good friends.
3. Chance to meet and network with some great people
The IIW events are organized by Phil Windley, Kaliya Hamlin and Doc Searls, who are great ambassadors for the identity community and are very approachable, if you attend I highly suggest taking time to meet each of them. JanRain will be represented by Michael Graves, Josh and Kevin (not Fox…). ClaimID will also be represented, and you can see who else is attending here.
4. Shameless plug here… Pibb will be the communication backchannel for the event
Click here to be taken to all the IIW 2007b action!
| By ltd | July 8th, 2008 | Comments [1]
