What’s my Google OpenID URL?
December 14, 2009
Short answer
It’s the same for all Google accounts:
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id
Your username is not part of the OpenID.
Long answer
Well, it seems little strange that Google, your friendly neighbourhood search giant, is so coy about its OpenID support. I had to search around for quite a while to find my OpenID URL, which is the thing you paste into the OpenID box at the service you want to sign up to.
Logging in with your OpenID URL
Why is Google doing this, you may ask? They are usually very good about these things and usually support an open standard (like they have done with XMPP, which they use for Google Chat.) My suspicion is that they want to plug their own OAuth instead, which is a similar protocol, but they effectively solve different problems.
Anyway, the URL that lets you sign into OpenID enabled services is
https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id
This URL is the same for all Google accounts; it redirects you to Google’s servers for you to confirm the logging in process. That’s it.
A good example
Stackoverflow.com is doing OpenID signing in right. I doesn’t ask you to fiddle with an OpenID URL but rather gives you nice and easy logos to click on – it fills in the URL for you. Well done!
Stackoverflow.com login page
It looks like google profile links also work:
http://www.google.com/profiles/$username
or go to http://www.google.com/profiles/me
to find out what it redirects to and use that
as an OpenID link.
It is fascinating when what might be useful as common knowledge appears as a little-known secret.
Does this not work with Google Apps (Standard Edition)?
I think Google Apps Accounts are handled differently. A stackoverflow answer suggests that it is something like: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/site-xrds?hd=your-domain.com
not sure if things are changing because they are enabling (at some point) profiles for google apps but as of the time that I am writing this you can use https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id as your openid url for google apps users.
Use http://www.google.com/profiles/myuser.name where my email is myuser.name@gmail.com
Neither https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id or http://www.google.com/profiles/my.name works for me.
I can login to sites that have a specific “Login with Google” button, but not on ones using generic OpenID.
Help?