OpenID stats on May 1st 2008

One of the most useful statistics to track the growth of OpenID is the count of Relying Parties (web sites that accept OpenID). Since launching myopenid.com nearly three years ago, we have been able to provide a fairly decent view of the RP landscape. Two and half years ago it was like Christmas every time a new site appeared. Whereas today we regularly see a 100 new unique sites a day.

Since we started providing these numbers, we’ve taken a conservative approach in what we call an RP. We strip out what appears to be purely dev testing. Anything with localhost, .local, ports other than 80 & 443 gets tossed. We also consolidate obvious related trustroots into one. For example sites like 37 signals, wetpaint and others, create many unique trustroots (which is perfectly valid), but for a truth in numbers sake we don’t count these as a separate 1000 sites, we count them as 1. Sometimes these patterns aren’t immediate obvious and we retroactively add them to a filter list. This can cause the RP count to be adjusted slightly downward over time.

At the end of April there were 13196 RP’s. At current rates, this number doubles before the kids go back to school in the fall, but I suspect we will be at a steeper growth curve before that time (more on this in another post).