[OpenID] OpenID 2.1 Identifier Types --> WAS [Discovery for Email like identifiers]

[Andrew Arnott]

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 6:59 PM, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com>wrote:

> I would love to see Janrain list the percentage of XRI users they've seen
> across their RPX installations. I bet you it's less than 1% of 1%.


We need to be careful how we judge this.  XRI may be a great feature, but if
no one is using it, that doesn't mean it's not important or great.  It may mean
that it's very poorly offered to users.

Myopenid.com, Google.com, Yahoo.com, ... these large/popular OPs have spent
a great deal of time making the UX as smooth as possible when issuing
Identifiers.  Do they offer XRIs?  No.  The only services that offer XRIs
that I've seen (I've seen just a handful) have crappy interfaces.  It's so
bad that as a programmer I can barely understand or tolerate them.  Let
alone the end user.  But it doesn't need to be this way.  XRIs can be easy
to use.  And if this was done, and if RPs actually implemented support for
them, I think we'd see them used a lot more.

Now before you say "then why does it matter if RPs don't implement them
because people aren't complaining?"  Who do we complain to?  RPs don't care
because not enough people want them.  Well you know what?  Almost no one
wants OpenID either... not because it's not a killer-awesome technology but
because no one's heard of it or knows how to use it.  For some reason we're
willing to keep marching forward the OpenID mantra but we don't care about
XRIs which suffer from similar problems?

I'm confused and frustrated at the lack of XRI adoption.  So there, ... now
you have one complainer. :)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openid.net/pipermail/openid-general/attachments/20090604/3935ee28/attachment.htm>