Over the past three years we’ve seen tremendous growth and increased adoption of OpenID. OpenID is quickly becoming the de-facto identity currency on the web but one of the biggest criticisms is its lack of usability. We’ve been thinking long and hard about this for the past few months at Vidoop and today we’re excited to launch Emailtoid. Emailtoid is a simple mapping service that enables the use of email addresses as OpenID identifiers. Feel free to give it a try on our example relying party.

Brad Fitzpatrick proposed a means to map email addresses to OpenID’s. Since then, people have been kicking around ways to do this. We decided to put together Emailtoid to see if Brad’s proposal has any legs as well as to really get the conversation going around how to take advantage of the fact that a lot of users on the web see their email address as an identifier.

From the Emailtoid website:

One of the criticisms of OpenID’s usability is the reliance on URLs for identifiers since people seem more comfortable identifying themselves by their email address. To remedy this problem, Emailtoid was established to offer a simple but robust means for turning email addresses into fully qualified OpenID URLs.

Once an account has been created on Emailtoid associating an email addresses with an existing OpenID (AOL, WordPress, etc), supporting relying parties can accept email addresses as identifiers without needing to ask for passwords.

Emailtoid is intended as a temporary solution to a usability problem in OpenID. If you run an email service and wish to resolve OpenIDs on behalf of your members, we have designed Emailtoid to always defer to email providers first, and then to fallback to our local resolution service if the email provider does not support email-to-OpenID resolution. We do this via XRDS discovery where we first ask the top level domain for a way to map email addresses to OpenIDs; if it doesn’t exist there, then the RP falls back to Emailtoid.

You will need to have support for OpenID on your site to make this work.

This isn’t the final solution but we’re hoping to start a dialog around the best practices for doing this. If you have questions/comments/concerns you can find us on our support site or via Twitter: @vidoop, @mtrichardson (the guy who actually did the work on Emailtoid - well done Michael), @kveton, @sblom or any of the Vidoop team you find on-line.

Update: Chris Messina did a great post about our new service. Its an excellent and detailed post about our thoughts on creating this service.