[OpenID] [OPenID] OpenID usage figures

[Jack]

Andreas Wagner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a German student writing my final thesis about Identity
> frameworks. As one of the most promising and successful working
> solutions, you probablly collected a lot of experience and
> information.
> 
> I try to analyse why some systems are successful and some are not. 
> Furthermore I developed some ratios helping me to separate successful
> and not-successful systems. To test this ratios, I would need usage
> figures of working and used solutions. I post this request within the
> community in hope someone has or knows where to get the following
> information:
> 
> - Total registered users in the OpenID federation within the last
> year
> 
> - Total amount of usages per month (same timeframe)
> 
> - New users per month (within the same timeframe as before)

With OpenID there's not really any way to get reliable figures.

For registered users, the figure is inflated by the large numbers of AOL
and LiveJournal users who have been involuntarily given userids; many of
them may not be aware of the fact they have an OpenID identifier, or
what that means. So the number of OpenIds issued is a pretty meanigless
statistic. Much the same goes for the number of new users monthly.

The number of "usages" - I assume you mean the number of RP
authentication requests - to determine that figure, you'd need
information from the logs of all OpenID Providers. You could get a
reasonable approximation by asking the big providers. But there's no
easy way of determining how many users have ids from small providers, or
how many run their own provider (but it's probably safe to assume that
the latter number is equivalent to "few").

The most interesting statistic would be the frequency of usage, and that
is also the statistic that is most easily gathered. I'd like to know the
answer.

-- 
Jack Cleaver.