Read/Write Web, Vidoop, and a Speedbump on the Street of OpenID

I’m a fan of OpenID, and have used myOpenID in the past as my provider. It worked well and let me leave OpenID-authenticated comments across the web, including at the popular web news site Read/Write Web.

Last week I switched to Vidoop as my OpenID provider (for a variety of reasons which are tangential to this post). When I went to leave a comment on Read/Write web, things were broken. After authenticating with myVidoop, I was sent back to Read/Write web and presented with an error:

An error occurred: The sign-in attempt was not successful; please try again.

I contacted the folks at Vidoop; they responded quickly and identified the situation. Vidoop requires a secure (https) connection for a website to use their authentication and Read/Write Web was not configured to accept SSL connections. I then got in touch with Read/Write web; they weren’t aware of the issue but they are now having someone look into it and will add support if they can do so easily.

Read/Write Web is the first site where I’ve seen this as an issue; hopefully this is a minor bump in the process of widespread OpenID support. One of the great things about OpenID is that it’s fairly easy for publishers to support; I hope that Read/Write Web is a special case and that others won’t have similar issues.