[OpenID] [OPenID] OpenID usage figures

[Andreas Wagner]

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.

--> I think this is as important as the other figures just because I need a
comparison to other solution, say OpenId has 10 Million OpenIds issued but
only 0.1% of them are using their ID - quite a bad usage, same with new
users where is the sense if I have thousand of new user every month but only
few start using it, I never gonna have a critical mass of users (actually
using it) 
--> my intention is to analyse why this is happening and what should be done
to get more people using it


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").

--> that's a start, what are the biggest providers?

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.

--> exactly what I'm looking for but this again only makes sense if I have a
comparison base, great if the ones using OpenId use it frequently but this
tells me nothing about the overall success. How do I get this information
anyway?

Andreas

--
Jack Cleaver.

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