Yay for OpenID... support?

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch finally raised a point which I've been wondering about for a long time.  He wonders if large technology companies aren't just jumping on the OpenID bandwagon to get good publicity out of it.

I've had that feeling ever since AOL announced their intention to make each of their user ID's an OpenID as well.  (The fact that their user ID's CANNOT be OpenID's because they are not actually URI's pretty much makes that impossible from a technical standpoint, instead it's more accurate to say that AOL is providing each of their subscribers with an OpenID to use.)  To me this looks like a play for publicity and an opportunity for user lock-in.  (However, I will say that it has worked in both directions, OpenID probably wouldn't have the momentum it now has if these companies hadn't announced their support.)

The problem is that these companies are only acting as ID providers, they are not enabling users from other systems to log in using THEIR ID's (to us geeks that means they're not acting as relying partys, only as issuers).  They're trying to have their cake and eat it too.  Arrington writes:

It’s time for these companies to do what’s right for the users and fully adopt OpenID as relying parties. That doesn’t fit in with their strategy of owning the identity of as many Internet users as possible, but it certainly fits in with the Internet’s very serious need for an open, distributed and secure single log in system (OpenID is all three).

There's a big difference between providing OpenID's and accepting them.  Providing OpenID's costs you pretty much nothing from a technical standpoint, and ties your users to your product.  Accepting them means that you're conceding that the users of your application have a home somewhere else and you're just letting them visit.

Hopefully the pressure on these companies to complete their adoption of OpenID will continue to mount and I'll be able to use my OpenID for everything in the near future.