So yesterday Dare announced that Microsoft, via Live ID were becoming an OpenID provider.

Big whoop.

So why am I so ambivalent? Being an OpenID provider is meaningless for Microsoft unless they start to accept OpenIDs for their services. At the moment be it on Microsoft.com, the Microsoft forums, Channel9, MSDN subscriptions, anything Microsoft web site needs personalisation demands a Live ID. Exposing a Live ID via OpenID simply allows existing "subscribers" to spread the Live ID tentacles into other sites; it does nothing to open up Live's web sites to interoperability with other identity providers; and that is, to my mind, far more important than giving another avenue for Live IDs to be spread. Yet another provider is unimportant; driving consumer uptake is. You can argue that suddenly giving however many hotmail users there are an OpenID will drive that; but I find that specious; if they updated the LiveID SDK to also be an OpenID SDK, giving ASP.NET developers an "official" OpenID consumer then that might drive uptake.

Maybe it's a hang over from the Hailstorm days but Live has never seemed to play nice with others. Even with a far stronger and better authentication method in the shape of Information Cards Live has happily ignored this (aside from a crappy beta attempt to support them which never worked with login pages other than Hotmail's).

Even now, with the well known problems with phishing for OpenID providers LiveID still have a plain old HTML form to login (not that I can; I keep being told my password is incorrect when it's not). When other OpenID providers are allowing users to bind Information Cards to their accounts to authenticate and to protect their users from phishing attackes Live are still ignoring something that is only a few buildings away.

I'll cheer when I can use my existing, Information Card protected, OpenID on a mainstream Microsoft website and when Live offer managed information cards to support interoperable logins on other sites. Not before.

(Credit where credit is due however; it's nice to see site specific OpenIDs supported, part of the OpenID 2.0 specification)