SignOn.com: CardSpace & OpenID

I knew that this edition of Catalyst was going to be exciting! If you are not among the lucky crowd that is attending the event, you can catch some news from the official news in Catalyst Live.

Among those news, my eye got caught by the announcement of SignOn.com. It is an OpenID provider with a twist: it allows you to sign in with Windows CardSpace! Above you can see their home page: they don’t use the new information card logo yet, but my guess is that they’ll update the page.

I immediately registered, in under a minute as advertised; unfortunately I was not able to create an account just using a card and I was forced to start via username and password. Once I signed up, I was able to associate a card to my account. I would be really happy to eliminate the password part altogether, because I see it as a liability, but it’s still great to be able to use information cards for this. One step at a time 🙂

Once I had an openID+card, I wanted to try it right away: then I went to LiveJournal to give it a try.

Below there’s the page I was greeted with:

I diligently entered my openid in the text field in the center and pressed login. As expected I was redirected to the signon.com pages:

Of course I went straight to the information card link, getting my familiar identity selector:

Piece of cake. I sent my usual main card, that the selector showed conveniently on top of the collection, and I went in.

“Allow Forever” sounded a commitment a bit too heavy for somebody who wants to retain the right to user consent, so I went with “Allow Once”.

And here I am: logged in LiveJournal, without using an account there. As Quagmire would say, “all riiiight!”.

That was very convenient, and I was extremely happy to be able to use all the cardspace goodness in the process (with the small inconvenience of knowing that my account there uses a password as well). In Kim‘s word (from the news page mentioned above):

“We believe the Information Card support will help improve the consumers’ online experience by extending the security and convenience benefits of the Identity Metasystem to SignOn.com users,” said Kim Cameron, Chief Identity Architect at Microsoft. “Microsoft is working with the industry to improve the trustworthiness of the Internet through phishing-resistant Information Card implementations, including Windows CardSpace.”

Well, do you need to hear more? 😉