OpenID is getting some press this week because AOL has decided to turn each of its 63 million AOL ID's into an OpenID.  Oh wait a second they're down to about 13 million subscribers now.  So AOL brings their 13 million subscribers give or take a few million (probably take) to the table, MAYBE a million of whom will actually know what to do with their OpenID.  Is this the lift OpenID needs to get it over the hump?  I hope not.

I can tell EXACTLY what AOL is doing here.  It's a devious little last-ditch effort to hitch their remaining subscribers to AOL forevermore.  An attempt to back-door user stickiness that they lost when broadband became king and they still can't keep by making it impossible to cancel their service.  How's that, you say?  Everyone else is excited about this!  Well, let's take a look at the implementation.

Each and every AOL OpenID is attached to the openid.aol.com domain.  So for example if your username is aolstud, your OpenID URI is http://openid.aol.com/aolstud.  That's great, you have a fully functioning OpenID.  HOWEVER, you are now eternally joined at the hip to AOL because of the fact that your OpenID lives on the openid.aol.com domain instead of a domain that you own.  The endpoint of your OpenID is an AOL page--ultimately controlled by AOL.  If you decide you want to start a real weblog, or move to another service, you have to start over again.  This is the part of online identity that not many people seem to grasp yet:  if you don't own your own domain and host your identity there, you don't own your own online identity, AOL does.  This is a wolf in sheep's clothing, I just hope people recognize it.

AOL is betting that people will start using this OpenID as their ID on other services thereby creating a permanent link between the user and AOL.  As I wrote in my post "How to Protect Your Online Identity", you should avoid doing this at all costs--in fact this is the antithesis of protecting your online identity, it's more along the lines of handing it to AOL--which hasn't been known for graciously giving up control of, well, ANYthing in the past.  It's a clever marketing ploy by AOL, but I sure hope it flops because I see it as more of a distraction from the true discussion of online identity ownership than a step forward.