[OpenID] About Facebook, MySpace and OpenID

[Peter Watkins]

On Fri, Apr 03, 2009 at 08:57:40AM -0700, Andrew Arnott wrote:
> I really don't understand this obsession you have about how OpenID is a
> useless "extra step" without an email address being part of it. Any shopping
> mall web site that requires a login will need to take a username+password,
> plus email verification, or an OpenID, plus email verification.  There's no
> extra step -- it's an exchange of one step for a different step.  And yes,
> it absolutely makes sense to do this because customers won't have to create
> yet another username and password.

Amen.

Or the shopping site could communicate with the user through MySpace, much 
as Google Checkout has allowed me to purchase stuff online without creating
a login account at the merchant site or giving the merchant my email address.
I haven't read all the "MySpaceID" docs, but it sounds like the OAuth token
might be sufficient for a merchant site to post updates to the user's MySpace
account. No merchant will do this MySpace-specific work unless thay see a
plausible ROI projection, but (!email) does not imply (!communication).

> I'm not disagreeing that skipping email verification would be convenient,
> but geez, man, how long can you beat this dead horse?

:-)