If you read some blog posts this past week — in which MySpace adopted OpenID, "bringing the total number of enabled accounts to half a billion" (Techcrunch), Orange’s portal in France became one of the largest acceptors of OpenIDs ever, and Facebook fully validated the OpenID proposition — one could get the impression that all of this is nothing but bad news for OpenID and it is about to die.

Say what?

Here are some example posts:

• Commenting on MySpace’s adoption, Nishant Kaushik (Oracle) writes: OpenID’s problems don’t seem to end.
• Jeff Bohren (ex-BMC) writes: You can’t build a highway with nothing but on ramps.
• And most bewilderingly, Dick Hardt (Sxip), who is (was?) known as one of the main cheerleaders for internet identity and OpenID, writes: Facebook Connect - fatal blow for OpenID?

I don’t even know where to start. But perhaps it’s very simple: Any technology that had its top-three adoptions ever in the past 6 months (Yahoo and Myspace as providers, Orange as acceptor), two of which happened last week, is doing very well, thank you.

How could anybody possibly think otherwise?

Having said that, I think it’s not a bad idea to respond to the various points that are being made as I understand them. To make this easier, I’ll paraphrase and summarize:

• Argument 1: "OpenID will never come to anything, as half a billion of available identities means nothing if there aren’t similarly many places where one can use those identities." This is known as the relying party adoption problem, compounded by extrapolating past trends linearly — which is of course not the way markets work. My response.
• Argument 2: "Unless I can have one single identity that works for the entire web, OpenID has no value proposition and nobody will ever use it." I call it the OpenID-all-or-nothing argument.
• Argument 3: "If OpenID does not break down walled gardens, and so far it has not, it’s useless." I call it the OpenID-matters-only-as-a-political-tool fallacy.
• Argument 4: "Facebook is going to win the internet identity war with a proprietary approach, there is nothing anybody will or can do about it, and OpenID (and by implication, all other identity technologies) are going to be irrelevant." One could call this the Passport 2.0 argument.

Of those, I consider last one to be the by far most interesting argument, because it deals with the heart of why OpenID matters to businesses — which at the end of the day determine the success or failure of most technologies of this kind.

But all of these arguments deserve a response, and I will respond to them over the next few days. Stay tuned, there is only that much I can write in a day…