Sears Adopts OpenID, Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter, and Windows Live ID Using JanRain RPX

It is an exciting day here at JanRain. We are announcing a great partnership with Viewpoints Network who has integrated RPX into its technology platform for the benefit of customers such as Sears. Website visitors to mysears.com or mykmart.com, which were recently launched and announced, can now easily register and login using an existing account from Facebook, Google, MySpace, Twitter, Windows Live, Yahoo!, or any OpenID account of their choice.

We are finding that RPX is a great complement to platform providers such as Viewpoints as it reduces the costs and burden from their development team while allowing them to provide a great solution direct to their customers. Here is what Matt Moog, Founder and CEO of Viewpoints had to say....

"As the social web becomes a bigger part of our everyday interactions and the boundaries separating the myriad of social networks blur, portable online identities will become critically important. By integrating JanRain's RPX product into our platform we instantly bring a market leading third party registration and login offering to our clients that makes it seamless for our community members to easily connnect their social graph and activity stream across the web."

In addition, Sears announnced this launch today as they are the first major retailer to adopt OpenID.

Relying Party Stats as of June 1, 2009

OpenID continues to gain market adoption at a steady rate, and in the month of May, the number of OpenID-enabled sites surged at a rate of 86 new enabled sites per day. There are now over 45,000 sites at which you can sign in with an OpenID. As we have mentioned previously, this number is understated, as we count umbrella sites like Blogger, Wordpress and LiveJournal (to name a few) as single sites, despite the fact that OpenID commenting is enabled at hundreds of thousands of unique blogs using those services.

We like to think that free platform solutions like RPX have helped fuel adoption for OpenID, by making it simple for website operators to deploy third party authentication in a few hours or less.

RPX integrated into mojoPortal’s open source CMS platform

MojoPortal, a popular open source CMS, recently integrated RPX into its platform. This allows mojoPortal customers to easily configure RPX directly from their mojo admin console. Below is a screenshot of the integration within the mojoPortal admin menu:




The mojoPortal CMS currently has over 4,000 users and is the third most popular download in the Microsoft Web Application Gallery, with 18,000 downloads in the past month. Even though mojoPortal had already integrated OpenID support into its platform and on the site a year ago, they decided to adopt RPX after observing its superb user experience and ease of deployment.

Additionally, mojoPortal integrated RPX on its homepage to allow customers and new visitors to easily sign in to the site with an existing third party account:




We're excited to see content management systems like mojoPortal make it even easier for new sites to add third party authentication.

Relying Party Stats as of May 1, 2009

42,235 sites are now enabled to accept OpenID logins. This number continues to grow dramatically as website operators seek to simplify their registration and login processes, and as end users increasingly demand control over the identity and where they take it across the web. Our suite of website enablement solutions (like RPX) are fueling this adoption by making it easy for websites to accept OpenID logins, with only a snippet of code required.

If you come across a neat website that is OpenID enabled, let us know by sending an email to directory AT myopenid DOT com. We'll add it to our directory of OpenID enabled sites.

New from Google and RPX

This morning Google announced two improvements to their OpenID provider service:

1) Extended user profile data. In addition to providing a verified email address, Google is now providing first and last name, country, and language via OpenID Attribute Exchange. These rich data fields can be used to help streamline registration for new users visiting your site.

2) Support for a user friendly popup based sign-in experience. This flow is a product of the OpenID User Experience Working Group, and keeps the sign-in process in the context of the current site by opening a small popup window to the provider. The result is a smoother sign-in experience that is easier to understand for users new to third party authentication.

We've been working with Google to test out these new features, both of which are now available to RPX based sites. Below is a screenshot of the popup experience, and you can try it out right now at Uservoice. The popup window appears when a user clicks the Google button.




Also new in RPX today is support for OpenID immediate mode in our widget. Immediate is a special mode of OpenID that makes the sign-in experience even faster and easier for returning users. If a user has already chosen to "remember the approval" for your website, immediate mode makes it so that the decision can be asserted on behalf of the user without redirecting the window to their provider. Facebook recently announced that will be using immediate mode to help returning users sign-in to facebook.com, and that same technology is now available instantly to every RPX customer. The user simply clicks the "Sign-in" button, and without leaving the current site they are signed in.

Technologies that power the web are constantly in flux. APIs, protocols, and user interface best practices are contantly changing and improving, and it can be a challenge to keep up with the latest technology from each provider.

Our mission with RPX is to help users get signed in to your website quickly and easily. A huge part of fulfilling that goal is making sure you always have access to the best technology available from the OpenID community and the top providers. With our API based software as a service model, when new technologies are released that can improve the sign-in process for your website, we implement them in RPX and they instantly become available for your website.

Immediate mode and the extended Google data fields are now live for every RPX based site. If you are interested in testing out the Google popup support, please email us at support@rpxnow.com. Following a short testing period the popup will be automatically turned on for all RPX customers. Additionally, when other OpenID providers come online supporting the new popup experience, they will instantly be enabled in RPX.

Sign-in using Twitter with RPX

Our mission with RPX is to help users get signed in to your website quickly and easily. We do this by helping visitors sign-in using an account they already have, without creating yet another username/password or verify an email address.

Today we are happy to announce support for Twitter based sign-in via RPX. Adding Twitter to your RPX grid will help you connect with the millions of users who use Twitter each day to stay connected online. When you add Twitter as a sign-in option, your users will easily be able to sign up for your site by clicking the Twitter button and authorizing your web application. It is simple, and easy for your users:



When a user logs off of your website, RPX remembers that they used Twitter to sign-in. The return experience greets them with a friendly message and one click sign-in experience:



If you already run a website that uses RPX for authentication, you may add twitter support by clicking "Configure Providers" from your developer console at rpxnow.com. If you are new to RPX, simply visit rpxnow.com to create a developer account and get started.

Rich API Access

In addition to adding Twitter authentication to the RPX API, starting today we now provide you with the extended access credentials for users who sign-in via Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Windows LiveID. With these extended access credentials you can do some wonderful things to improve your user's experience like publish items to the Facebook stream, build a Twitter application, or help a user update their status on MySpace.

This is our first step in making it possible for you to build a deeper integration into your application using third party APIs. Just as we've done for authentication with RPX, this summer we will begin offering a set of APIs and tools that make social integration cross provider and simple.

Facebook to Accept OpenIDs on its Website

Today Facebook announced that it is going to become an OpenID Relying Party (RP) which means that anyone with an OpenID (AOL, Google, MySpace, Yahoo) and Microsoft (in beta) can create and log into a Facebook account using those credentials. This is big news as now one of the largest social networks will be OpenID-enabled.


Since early 2008 we have seen all the major identity providers becoming issuers of OpenIDs (AOL, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and soon Microsoft). By the end of 2008 and early 2009 we started to see an increase in websites accepting users with these OpenIDs to login. As many of you know, JanRain launched its RPX solution to easily enable websites to accept both OpenIDs and proprietary protocols like Facebook Connect and Windows Live IDs. We expect that other large web properties are realizing, like Facebook, that lowering the barrier to login is essential to an enhanced customer experience on their site.


Congrats to the Facebook team!