In 2005 the Janrain team began working to solve the problem consumers faced from password fatigue and companies faced as a result of poor registration conversion rates.   Fast forward to 2008, following the lead of Janrain, Clickpass became another early innovator in the social login space.

With this acquisition, Janrain unites our two customer bases. Clickpass customers can now gain access to the most widely deployed solution for social login – one that is implemented across 365,000+ websites, supports more than 25 social networks and email providers, enables brands to collect and store a rich set of social profile data, and lets users easily share content to their social networks.

If your website currently uses Clickpass to enable authentication, please click here or contact us to learn more about next steps and how you can easily get up and running with Janrain Engage social login and social sharing.

When we began development of Janrain Engage in early 2008 we talked with online marketers at brand and destination websites about their frustrations and challenges with user authentication, as well as their perceptions of using a third party identity login method (ie, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, etc) to resolve these issues.  At the same time I reached out to a variety of SaaS companies that provided products such as community and commenting functionality.

These technology companies had very real concerns about integrating third party login into their platforms: usability, deployment requirements and time, impact on internal development resources, future feature enhancements, and ongoing maintenance requirements.

As a result, we developed the first version of Janrain Engage based on the requirements of both brand websites and technology platforms, essentially building it with extensibility and integration to other platforms in mind from day one.  Those development decisions have been proven out by the great partners we have today that have selected Janrain Engage to power some of the most critical parts of their platform – user identity and authentication.

One of the partners I have had the privilege and enjoyment of working with for almost two years is Ning.  Ning is the world’s largest platform for creating social websites and is constantly bringing new features and enhancements to their customers.  In early 2010 when Patrick Mee, Ning’s Vice President of Engineering, reached out to discuss their requirements for offering social login and invite friends as features on the Ning platform it was another proof point, that we had made the right decisions to design Engage for interoperability and easy integration.

Based on Ning’s extensive customer base and solid platform, I anticipated Patrick and the Ning product team to conduct a very extensive technical due diligence.  I wouldn’t have expected anything else since the integration of an outsourced component raises the bar on feature requirements (both today and in the future), architecture, scalability, security, reliability of both the product and services, deployment support, leadership in the industry, viability, and much more.

Ning did not let me down – it was a thorough due diligence of Janrain Enagage.  After several months they made the choice and Janrain was selected to be their partner to provide some of these great social features for the Ning communities.

Some of the great aspects of working closely with other SaaS companies are the insights, new feature ideas, and general technology knowledge sharing that goes on. And we continue to optimize our solutions for easy integration with other platforms, including the release last year of the Janrain Partner API.

The just published Ning Case Study summarizes some of the success they have seen from incorporating Janrain Engage. Ning has been a great partner to work with and many thanks to Patrick, Cristian, Anne, Paul, Nick and Evan for the continued support.

Since early 2008 we have seen all the major identity providers becoming issuers of OpenIDs (AOL, Yahoo, Google, MySpace and soon Microsoft). By the end of 2008 and early 2009 we started to see an increase in websites accepting users with these OpenIDs to login. As many of you know, JanRain launched its RPX solution to easily enable websites to accept both OpenIDs and proprietary protocols like Facebook Connect and Windows Live IDs. We expect that other large web properties are realizing, like Facebook, that lowering the barrier to login is essential to an enhanced customer experience on their site.

Congrats to the Facebook team!

I registered on Dailymotion.com using myOpenID and it was a solid experience as they brought over some profile data (age, country) to accelerate setting up my account. They also allowed me to easily delete the OpenID I had associated with my Dailymotion account and add a different OpenID provider. The return login experience is one click away as they pre-populate my OpenID login box with the one I have set for my account.

Today there are about 30,000 websites that accept OpenIDs and that number is growing at double digit growth rates each month. Some recent sites that just became OpenID enabled include MapQuest, UserVoice, and Interscope Records.

To see it in action, use your MySpace account to login at one of the many Interscope Geffen A&M; music artist websites like Snoopdogg.com or home page of Interscope.com where you can instantly “Join the Community”. This makes RPX the ideal solution for any website that wants to provide the easiest login possible for their website users regardess of which identity provider they use — MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, AOL, or any other OpenID account.

There has been a lot of news the past week about Facebook Connect, Google FriendConnect, and MySpaceID. At the end of the day what do these announcements mean for website operators and end users? For the website operator there are two big benefits: (1) increased site registrations by allowing users to login with their credentials from MySpace, Facebook, Google, AOL, or Yahoo!…that’s a lot of users, and (2) creating an instant social community on their website by pulling over the user’s profile information including friends and interests. For the website user it means they don’t need to create and most likely forget another username and password on a site they might not be visiting everyday, and they can expect a richer and more personalized experience after logging in with one of their existing third party accounts.

Doesn’t this all sound great?!?! It is great but it can also means extra work for the website operator to deal with protocols from each identity provider. For example, Facebook Connect has a proprietary protocol while MySpace makes use of open standards such as OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial. This is where RPX comes in. As stated this morning in a ReadWriteWeb article titled JanRain Offers Distributed Social Options Galore, Interscope Geffen A&M; Bites, “JanRain is providing a solution that solves a problem for developers – how to efficiently implement the variety of logins – and users – to log into sites with the most familiar credentials.”

• “We deployed OpenID in January of this year and saw registrations increase by 200%. Currently about 25% of our registrations occur via OpenID.”
• “We’ve seen a ten-fold increase in registrations via OpenID and third party services”

Learn about their experiences first hand in short case studies for these three market leading organizations. As you consider implementing OpenID on your website, think about the words of Jeff Atwood, CEO of Stack Overflow: “Here’s the question you have to ask yourself: do you really want to be yet another website offering yet another username and password to your users? Or do you want to be part of the solution?” Learn more through these OpenID Case Studies.

Here is how it works:

When you visit HealthVault(TM) (http://www.healthvault.com/) to set up an account, you will be prompted to enter your myOpenID. Then if you have not already done so, you will be required to login to your myOpenID account using either your username and password or a secure Microsoft InfoCard. If you have also enabled CallVerifID(TM), or another secure authentication method, you will be prompted to use that second factor to sign in. By offering Microsoft InfoCard support and a second factor authentication method, myOpenID users can feel more secure from fraudulent access to their HealthVault account. Read more