RPX addresses User Experience and Profile Data Requests

A lot has been happening with OpenID in the last couple of months. There are now over 30,000 OpenID-enabled sites and over 600 million OpenID-enabled user accounts, with another 400M+ coming from Microsoft LiveID accounts soon. MapQuest went live with OpenID and CitySearch announced its plans to roll out OpenID shortly.

Last week both the Interscope division of Universal Music Group and UserVoice went live with RPX.

• Rick Turoczy of ReadWriteWeb wrote a good blog post on the UMG launch. Read about their plan to rollout OpenID across 200 artist websites.

• UserVoice has a very intuitive OpenID implementation that even allows you to link an OpenID to a detected legacy account. In addition, UserVoice wrote a blog post on RPX. OpenID was the second most requested enhancement for their website.

At the OpenID Content Provider Advisory Committee meeting in NYC earlier this year, two of the major requests were for (1) improved user experience and (2) more user profile data. Many of you provided subsequent feedback on how to improve the UX which has been incorporated into RPX. We hope you’ll take a look at the RPX UX on Interscope and UserVoice and share your feedback.

Working closely with all the major OpenID Providers as well as Facebook, the RPX team has done its best to leverage all the user profile data that is available for website operators. RPX just added MySpace support last week. Here’s the list of current data that is available to relying parties from some of the major 3rd party providers via RPX. This will allow Relying Parties to instantaneously build rich user profiles leveraging existing information from other accounts.

• AOL: country, postal-code, birthday, email, gender, preferred-username, url

• Google: verified email, with more data expected soon
  

• Facebook: about_me, activities, affiliations, birthday, books, current_location, education_history, first_name, hometown_location, hs_info, interest, last_name, locale, meeting_for, meeting_sex, movies, music, name, notes_count, political, profile_url, proxied_email, quotes, relationship_status, religion, sex, significant_other_id, status, timezone, tv, wall_count, work_history

• MySpace: aboutMe, age, bodyType, books, children, currentLocation, dateOfBirth, drinker, emails, ethnicity, gender, hasApp, heroes, interests, jobs, lookingFor, movies, name, familyName, networkPresence, nickname, profileSong, profileUrl, religion, sexualOrientation, status, tvShows, urls, photos

• Yahoo: SREG support is currently in test mode with two partners (JanRain and Plaxo). We expect their data portions to go live soon with email, nickname, fullname, language, postal-code, email, gender

Here's what some of the major providers are saying about RPX:

• Max Engel of MySpace: “JanRain offers a service to help sites easily get going with portable identity solutions by handling the ‘UI, authentication, and import of user profile and registration data for your website.’ It is a great complement to MySpaceID, by offering compatibility with our identity platform. As a developer, this can help you easily get going with our platform while letting JanRain handle much of the heavy lifting with their excellent product offering. We're excited to be integrated into the product as of last week, and have been collaborating to help provide the developer community with a better experience.”

• Luke Shepard of Facebook on what will drive OpenID adoption: “Easy tutorials, developer examples, and videos are great. Fantastic, up-to-date, and usable libraries are even better. Easy-install plugins (like MovableType) and full-scale solutions like RPX are the best.”

• George Fletcher of AOL: “JanRain's recent release of RPX Basic is the first public offering of OpenID RP SaaS. This will make it a lot easier for many sites to integrate OpenID into their existing content and services and provide their features to a greater audience. I believe this is an important development in the adoption of OpenID and am hopeful that standards will develop around this capability.”

We’ve also created case studies highlighting the successes that some organizations have had implementing OpenID:

• PropertyMaps – “We deployed OpenID in January of this year and saw registrations increase by 200%. Currently about 25% of our registrations occur via OpenID. As more major OpenID providers like MySpace come online, and as consumers become more familiar with OpenID, we expect to see these numbers increase as well. An example of this is when Yahoo's implementation came online in February, we saw a surge of user registrations.”

• Mixx.com – “We've seen a ten-fold increase in registrations via OpenID and third-party services. We've also observed a 20% increase in registrations from direct and referrer traffic.”

• Stackoverflow – “We launched our public beta in late September, with one authentication method: OpenID. Within a few weeks all of our registered site users, about 10,000 so far, were logging in via OpenID.”

• Get Satisfaction – “We launched OpenID in July of 2008. OpenID utilization varies by client. Clients with younger, more tech-savvy customers see faster adoption and usage. For example, Twitter and Songbird are experiencing utilization of up to 20% or more.

• 37Signals – “Our main reason was to get single sign-on (SSO) across our products. OpenID gave us a quick and easy way to link accounts with one master identity, an OpenID. It's an open standard, getting an OpenID is quick and easy, and OpenID allows people to use one identity to login across all of our products and thousands of public websites. We launched OpenID in March 2008 with Highrise. About 15% of the logins on are now using OpenID.”

If you have time for a 15 minutes for a webinar, we can give you a brief demo of how RPX works and answer any questions you may have. We’d also like to get more feedback from you on how to improve user experience, user profile data, or other aspects of OpenID to meet your needs.