Justen Stepka

When the web was first blossoming in 1994, I remember sitting in my parents’ basement playing with coax network cables linked together providing a shared Internet using a pair of bonded 28.8 modems.

Back then we used IRC on EFNet where within a few years the network would spike to over 150k concurrent connections. The other geeks and I camped out in channels (chat rooms) like #linux, #freebsd and later #java.

Fast forward to now, and I cannot imagine living without the ability to send an instant message between co-workers. We run our own jabber server giving us private, secure, instant communication.

Getting that quick response, or sharing a link between myself and another co-worker is like electricity, something that cannot be lived without. The thing that changed from in my basement to now is that Metcalfe’s law has come into play:

Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n²). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe’s law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web.

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

Nearly everyone I know who was not a geek used AOL for their Internet connection as part of their initiation to the Internet. As a result I needed an AOL AIM account to communicate with the newly initiated, anyone who was starting to get broadband needed an AOL AIM account, etc. Now pretty much everyone I know has an AOL AIM account. This is how I stay in contact with my friends and family as I have moved throughout life.

This same principal is bringing OpenID day-by-day closer to being the Internet technology everyone has to have integrated into their website. What AOL IM did for instant communication, is what OpenID is doing for Internet security.

Many say that we have already been there and done that. There are technologies in place such as SAML, Liberty Alliance which solve this. Unfortunately for good technologies, first to market or even the best solution does not always win. Look at the beta max versus the VHS story that played out in the 80s.

Today there are over 90 million OpenID enabled accounts thanks to AOLs opening of their security framework to use OpenID. Open source and free OpenID providers sites let anyone create a single profile and login for all of their favorite websites. It is only a matter of time until portal sites like Google and Yahoo offer an OpenID provider services which links back to your primary Internet account.

It is estimated that fifty or more sites a day are coming online with support for the technology because open source Java projects like OpenID4Java.org make it trivial for web-developers to integrate with OpenID. There are additional APIs for Ruby and PHP. The only thing that holds one back on getting OpenID enabled is a few hours of their time.

Like AOL AIM, the force of Metcalfe’s Law is now giving OpenID the inertia necessary to becoming the mainstream approach for authentication on the web. If you are not thinking about how to integrate, you had better start now before your competitors do.