New: Google & OpenID: discovery URL

A while back, I mentioned that Google supported Opendid. There's one important detail that I had a hard time finding amidst the mountains of documentation:

If the user wants to use their Google account to log in via OpenID, the discovery url is https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

That was hard to find. I think it took me over an hour. It's mentioned on the Federated Login for Google Account Users page... halfway down... under a diagram showing the back-and-forth of redirects which I didn't especially care about because of course my code has to handle those already for all of the other OpenID redirections. And with plenty of mentions of OAuth, just to further convince me that I must be looking at the wrong page, and wander off to look at other places.

It took me just a few minutes to find out Yahoo!'s OpenID discovery URL. Some Yahoo! technical writer deserves a bonus.

(Yeah, yeah, I saw the blog post about webfinger and how it will automagically discover discovery URLs and we'll all be sitting down at lovely unicorn tea parties forever. But maybe instead of waiting for that, I'll just let people log in via their Yahoo or Google account, and that's probably gonna handle all of my users just fine, thank you.)

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Posted 2009-08-16