One of the big buzzwords going around for the past year has been Single Sign-On, or SSO. Its been making its presence felt so hard that CRT felt we should help sponsor and provide hosting for open source implementation of one flavor of it, even if we weren’t going to contribute any code.
The ‘one flavor’ I mention above is going down the path of using the SAML standard. SAML is an OASIS standard with some work contributed by the Liberty Alliance. For some reason, within the Real Estate community, SAML has caught on THE WAY TO DO IT. You can see working implantations of SAML in real estate used by CAR, Rapattoni, and Clareity Security. However, like anything related to technology There Is More Than One Way To Do ItTM.
Recently, the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined their board. That’s a lot of big weight going with OpenID. Many of those companies already accept OpenID as a form of authentication or are OpenID providers themselves. Yahoo! is a prime example of a large OpenID provider. It seems like momentum is certainly gaining on OpenID, which is pretty impressive for something that just started in 2005. (In full disclosure, it should be noted that CRT had David Recordon from the OpenID and SixApart as a panel member at the last NAR Annual convention.)
In looking at OpenID’s web site I found a quote from Brad Fitzpatrick, the father of OpenID, to a philosophy I really like and I think is important for a shared resource this like:
Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.
Obviously, a lot of this follows CRT’s general open-source philosophy which I’ve alwasy been a big fan of. However, I think this contrasts with some of what we see in our market. This is something I’ve been hearing saying we all need, that its not a competitive advantage.
In any case, given the philosophy behind it and where we need to go in real estate, I think its time to give OpenID another look, especially given the added weight it received this week.
No matter the technology the future is an exciting place. Imagine using your MLS id as a your way to get onto realtor.org. Or maybe NAR is the ID provider that allows you to access your MLS, gmail account, and your favorite blog?
(Just a quick final note: It should be noted that just because you have can share a common piece of authentication, it doesn’t mean a user of that authentication system will allow full access to anyone. There is still authorization levels at each site. This is the same between both models discussed here.)
I haven’t had much time to tinker, play, drool, or ponder - but A little over a week ago the Houston Association of REALTORS launched their new site. I continue to use them as the poster child for what I would love to see occur across the country. HAR is leveraging themselves as a marketing venue for their members, as opposed to simply just a facilitator for the exchange of listing compensation/policy info between their members.
Some of the most important best practices in software engineering deal with automation; 
One of the things I’ve always held to for CRT’s blog is “If we don’t have anything to say, let’s not make up something just so we can have a post.” The problem with this is sometimes we’re quiet for over a month.
