[OpenID] Teenagers do not need OpenID

[Chris Messina]

It's certainly interesting and anecdotal -- but at the same time, I
think that there will always be proponents and negators of these kind
of efficiencies.

If you were to offer to those same teens the ability to unite their
WII and Playstation friends, they might think differently. Or, in
limited application (importing only a few friends at a time) this
functionality might actually be useful.

I do agree that the situation for non-web-lifers (people on this list)
is probably a lot different from our own (which suddenly makes me feel
a lot more concerned about the recent phishing discussion) but if the
normal behavior is just to abandon identities like snake skins every
time they forget their password, perhaps we should consider how
abandoning OpenIDs that connect user accounts across multiple sites
might be a good, or bad, thing.

Specifically -- let's say that I have an iDP, but I forget or lose my
credentials for logging into it. Or, worse, let's say that I forget
who my iDP is -- so I can't even go back to try to recover my password
(believe me, this will happen)! Does that they mean that I'm locked
out from all the sites that I used my OpenID to sign into? It
certainly sounds like it!

Anyway, this scenario might sound totally outlandish from our
position, but I'm quite sure it's something that we need to have a
best practice for dealing with.

Chris

On 1/26/07, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote:
> Fascinating:
>
> http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2007/01/01/ephemeral_profi.html
>
> Sara created a MySpace using an email address that she made
> specifically for that purpose. After vacation, she couldn't remember
> her MySpace password (or her email password). She created a new
> MySpace page using a new throwaway email address. When i asked her if
> she was irritated that she had to do this after investing time in the
> previous profile, she said, "nah.. I had too many Friends that I
> didn't know anyways."
>
> [...]
>
> Teens are not dreaming of portability (like so many adults i
> meet). They are happy to make new accounts on new sites; they enjoy
> building out profiles.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> general mailing list
> general at openid.net
> http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/general
>


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