Google is now an OpenID provider

With the current trend to open up it seems like everyone is competing to provide bits and pieces to the overall equation. Now Google has become an OpenID provider.

This happened shortly after Yahoo announced their upcomming OpenID support. Yahoo will go public beta end of January though. Google's OpenID works today.

The Google support is through Blogger.com. Meaning that the OpenID URL you submit to login is a URL to one of your blogs. At the moment you need to login to Blogger at http://draft.blogger.com/ - then update your Blogger profile. Currently it only works for blogs with a blogspot.com URL.

This is not a big surprise, especially since Blogger earlier enabled OpenID for comments.

And I just tried it. Did the trick for Dopplr login.

One question - what about blogs that are maintained by multiple persons? Will the blog URL be possible to use by all users who are registered to the blog?

The answer seems to be yes - if the other individual is admin of the blog. This means that such blog URLs will be possible to use by multiple persons, using each persons individual blogger login credentials.

By design or a "feature"? Guess it comes with the architecure. Might be a handy feature in some scenarios, but be aware that granting other people admin access to a blog might open up some OpenID sites for them.

Update 080129: Just noticed from a post at BloggerInDraft that the Blogger OpenID service can be used by any domain you own. This by using a delegate feature. Nice.