[OpenID] A selector for OpenID

[Sam Alexander]

>
> I do think something like ideslector is a good idea. As I said  
> earlier, I'd been
> thinking about this sort of thing for making it easier for regular  
> AOL and Yahoo!
> users to use OpenID on the sites I'm responsible for. I can only  
> hope that your
> remote scripting model "fails in the marketplace" as we Yanks like  
> to say. No malice
> intended, I just think hosting the resources outside the RPs is the  
> wrong approach.

Lets be fair here, I think its safe to compare this to, say, Google's  
Urchin analytics scripts.  That script is hosted off-site, and is  
gathering and tracking a helluva lot more data than JanRain's  
idselector.com.  [1]

Is this an anti-pattern?  Perhaps, but it is one that website  
developers are aware of and either completely avoid (as Peter has  
brought up), or knowingly submit to.  We should probably decry Google  
as well, but my point is that judging by the sheer volume of those who  
use Urchin, there are some sites for which this is not a concern.

All of the information about the providers listed in the idselector is  
publicly available, and most of it is actually listed on OpenID.net.   
To create your own in-house-only version of idselector.com would  
require very little expertise.  In fact, the script provided by  
JanRain is kindly not obfuscated at all, so if one needs help, one may  
just take-a-peak.  You should probably ask JanRain first, but judging  
from their community record, I bet they'd jump at the chance to help.

I actually hope this approach will do quite well.  Why?  Because  
JanRain has provided the most "crutch-less" solution available today.   
They have created a very usable, click-friendly, logo-happy solution  
-- all without hiding the fact that your OpenID is (gasp) a URL!   
While a user can still do things in just a few clicks, they are not  
completely in-the-dark about the process.

While interaction designers are trained to hide as much of the  
'implementation model' (meaning whats really going on) as possible --  
I think that we ALL win when Uncle Cletus shows up at your website  
(which doesn't have the idselector.com script) yet still remembers to  
type in http://unclecletus.myopenid.com because thats what he's used  
to seeing in the input field when he clicks the "Sign In" button.

-Sam

[1] Which, lets not forget, should by its very nature only be included  
on non-logged-in user's pages, creating a much less attractive honey  
pot should the very worst happen