MyOpenID will be turned off on February 1, 2014

80 points by yureka 11 years ago | 28 comments
[Email sent to myOpenID users]

Hello,

I wanted to reach out personally to let you know that we have made the decision to end of life the myOpenID service. myOpenID will be turned off on February 1, 2014.

In 2006 Janrain created myOpenID to fulfill our vision to make registration and login easier on the web for people. Since that time, social networks and email providers such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Yahoo! have embraced open identity standards. And now, billions of people who have created accounts with these services can use their identities to easily register and login to sites across the web in the way myOpenID was intended.

By 2009 it had become obvious that the vast majority of consumers would prefer to utilize an existing identity from a recognized provider rather than create their own myOpenID account. As a result, our business focus changed to address this desire, and we introduced social login technology. While the technology is slightly different from where we were in 2006, I’m confident that we are still delivering on our initial promise – that people should take control of their online identity and are empowered to carry those identities with them as they navigate the web.

For those of you who still actively use myOpenID, I can understand your disappointment to hear this news and apologize if this causes you any inconvenience. To reduce this inconvenience, we are delaying the end of life of the service until February 1, 2014 to give you time to begin using other identities on those sites where you use myOpenID today.

Speaking on behalf of Janrain, I truly appreciate your past support of myOpenID.

Sincerely, Larry

  • SCdF 11 years ago
    Crap.

    So I have used MyOpenID for years, ever since SO forced me to use it. In every situation where openId was an option I've used it in deference to connecting a google/fb account or creating a new user/pass. I have used it for countless websites. Literally countless. As in, I have used it everywhere and I haven't written down where I've used it, because if I go to log in and I see it supports openid I know that I used myopenid.

    I also don't know much about the technical aspects of openID (though it sure sounds like an upskilling is about to be forced on me).

    I have my own domain, and I'm happy to run openid through that, and I'm sure 10 minutes of google's time will make that setup plain.

    What's not plain is how I migrate from myopenid to my own openid provider? Everything I've signed up with is attached to my xxx.myopenid.com url correct? So do I get to keep that URL somehow and point it to an implementation elsewhere? Or does every website that uses openid have to support migrating between openid urls?

    • tlrobinson 11 years ago
      Unless you setup delegation to your own domain, then yeah, you're probably signed up using your xxx.myopenid.com URL. This is the main reason I used delegation.

      You should at least be able to get a list of sites you've logged in at https://www.myopenid.com/sites

      • SCdF 11 years ago
        Awesome, so I have about 30^, which is less than I thought, but more than I'd hoped.

        I guess I have half a year to migrate them all :-/

        ^Though actually far more like slightly over a dozen once you get rid of all the stack exchange duplicates

    • andridk 11 years ago
      Just need Stackexchange to upgrade to Persona. That's probably the only place where I've found OpenID useful.
      • taude 11 years ago
        Funny, that's why I originally used OpenID, too. Hooked my Google up to it recently, though.
        • pavel_lishin 11 years ago
          I think that's the only place I use OpenID. Maybe. I'm not sure, to be honest - every time I go there, I keep selecting providers until I happen to click on the one that I originally chose to log in with.

          I'd much rather just have a series of <service>@<lastname.org> usernames with randomly generated passwords.

      • jamestomasino 11 years ago
        Well, crap. Anyone else have a good endpoint I can redirect to? I don't want one of my social networks to be the king of my identity. I want to own that with my master domain.
        • Sidnicious 11 years ago
          I delegate to Symantec’s (previously Verisign’s) OpenID service:

          https://pip.verisignlabs.com/

          …it's been pretty solid for me and supports two-factor auth. The <head> of my OpenID endpoint looks like this:

            <link rel="openid.server" href="http://pip.verisignlabs.com/server">
            <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://[me].pip.verisignlabs.com">
            <link rel="openid2.provider" href="http://pip.verisignlabs.com/server">
            <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://[me].pip.verisignlabs.com">
            <meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://pip.verisignlabs.com/user/[me]/yadisxrds">
          • icebraining 11 years ago
            Does it support CNAMEing? I really like that I can add a DNS record on some subdomain of my personal domain and have it just work, without even a web server.
            • jamestomasino 11 years ago
              Fantastic! I'm implementing that now. Thanks.
          • allard 11 years ago
            One thing nice about myOpenID was that you could auth in with nothing more than your myOpenID, if the consumer (do I have the right part?) allowed it. No name, no email address.

            claimid.com exists too.

            • lectrick 11 years ago
              This is a great service and I am uncomfortable with the seemingly universal expectation that everyone should be OK with facebook/twitter/google/linkedin style "corporate" auths.
              • kseistrup 11 years ago
                Even now then web site seems to be down…

                So what other alternatives do we have? www.clavid.com seems to have a lot of options, but using your own domain name — the way you could do it with myOpenID — isn't one of them.

                • elektronaut 11 years ago
                  My favorite part of OpenID has always been that you can delegate your identity using your own site. myOpenID got increasingly spotty for me, so I switched to Google. If I decide to stop trusting Google, delegating elsewhere is almost no effort.

                  Here are the magic tags for Google:

                    <link rel="openid2.provider" href="https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/ud?source=profiles">      
                    <link rel="openid2.local_id" href="http://www.google.com/profiles/[your profile id]">
                  
                  Looks like Clavid also supports delegation:

                  http://www.clavid.ch/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&...

                  • kseistrup 11 years ago
                    Does delegating to Google also work for Google Apps [for Your Domain]?
                    • zhovner 11 years ago
                      Yes, if you have google plus profile on this account. Profile ID now means google plus ID.
                  • gemma 11 years ago
                    I just switched to clavid. As @elektronaut pointed out they do support delegation, and their two-factor authentication supports a big list of OTP standards (so it's compatible with the Google Authenticator): http://www.clavid.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...
                    • 11 years ago
                      • andreaso 11 years ago
                        I have a clavid.com openid delegated using my own domain...
                        • kseistrup 11 years ago
                          Oh, cool, I'll tale a closer look at Clavid. Cheers.
                      • mindcrime 11 years ago
                        Wonder if they would consider selling the service to somebody else, who might want to keep it live? Even more, I wonder how much it would cost to run a service like MyOpenID? It would be awesome if we could put together a community backed org to keep it alive...
                        • devinegan 11 years ago
                          I would recommend checking out password-less and multi-factor alternatives that support OpenID, like LaunchKey: https://launchkey.com/docs/openid

                          (disclosure: co-founder)

                          • lake99 11 years ago
                            Thanks for providing the service so far. You have been my go-to place for creating a whole bunch of anonymous IDs, that I would then use to sign in on various websites.
                            • jeena 11 years ago
                              Phuch, at least I used delegation. I'm not really in the mood of setting up the whole provider code, is there some alternative which I could delegate it to?
                              • 11 years ago
                              • bemmu 11 years ago
                                Since you are shutting it down, can you share some interesting stats such as a Google Analytics screenshot from launch until now?
                                • ottonomy 11 years ago
                                  Thankfully, the best way to use myOpenID was to delegate to it from the ID you actually wanted to use, so everybody who did this will still be able to log in using their OpenID credentials as soon as they find a replacement to actually be the endpoint.
                                  • SCdF 11 years ago
                                    Except noobs (such as myself) who rushed to create one when the SO beta opened didn't know this, and are now stuck with quite a few sites attached to a soon to be 404'ing service :-(
                                  • mknappen 11 years ago
                                    Thank you.
                                    • JohnMunsch 11 years ago
                                      Yeah, that might be a bit of inconvenience.