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Since the advent of authentication in the realm of information systems the holy grail has been streamlining authorization by using one username and password for all things - or as people in-the-know call it: “Single Sign-On“.

It started at the enterprise (back when IT innovation used to be a top-down process) with things like Microsoft’s Active Directory. Active Directory created a single sign on scenario for interacting with corporate applications - email, file/network shares, printers, etc.

Next this thing called the web came along and people started creating applications that required password protected accounts, profiles, etc. So, in the natural progression of authorization and authentication practices - the next big thing became creating the killerest single sign on solution.

Emre Sokullu wrote a piece for Read/Write Web awhile ago that had a succinct history of single sign-on approaches on the web from the majors…

1994 Yahoo Initiates Single Sign-On Paradigm; Company Foundation
1998 MSN Starts its own Single Sign-On Paradigm; Announcement of MSN Passport
1998 Google Initiates Search-Centric Paradigm; Company Foundation
2002 Yahoo Follows up with Search-Centric Paradigm; Acquisition of Inktomi
2004 Google Starts its own Single Sign-On Paradigm; Gmail and Google Accounts
2004 -2005 MSN Follows up with Search-Centric Paradigm; Live.com
2005 OpenID Initiates single sign-on for independent sites; Project Foundation

I bring it up now as we are working on a few web applications. Should we support OpenID? I don’t think so - but I thought I’d ask you first.

Tags: OpenID, Single Sign-On, Web, Development

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