Can OpenID solve the mobile web application login problem? February 25, 2008
Posted by James Webster in : web, mobile , trackbackLinkedIn have announced LinkedIn Mobile (via TechMeme) available at http://m.linkedin.com. The ‘m.’ prefix has definitely become the defacto way to access mobile-specific versions of web applications; so much for the .mobi TLD then which is after all a pain to enter onto a phone keypad without the benefit of T9.
Anyway, having a mobile version of LinkedIn and Facebook and which-social-network-is-hot-this-month is all good but now I have the challenge of having to enter my username and password for the mobile version as well. See, since I use Johannes la Poutré’s Password Composer bookmarklet to generate a unique password based on a hash of the website’s domain and a strong password that never leaves my browser (see Jon Udell’s excellent screencast from 2005 on Simple Single Sign-On to understand more) I don’t really know what my password for LinkedIn/Facebook/etc is, at least not off the top of my head.
It has struck me that OpenID could provide a solution here. If my carrier offered an OpenID provider tied to my phone number I could authenticate to OpenID-compatible websites using my phone in hopefully a reasonably transparent fashion, once I had maybe used the main web interface of LinkedIn (or Facebook, etc, etc) to approve my OpenID on my mobile carrier’s provider.
OpenID has seen a growth in support from big players in the industry, with Google, VeriSign, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo! all joining recently as corporate board members of the OpenID Foundation. Some of them have OpenID-access enabled to their web applications or OpenID-providers available as beta releases. Major mobile carriers are conspicuously absent however. To me, it seems like they missing a major opportunity to innovate.
Oh, and here’s a link to my LinkedIn profile :-).
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