[Marketing] [OpenID] Website Being Updated Today

[Dick Hardt]

I appreciate the problem with the current listing. It is not very  
useful to a user.

I agree that Drummond's proposal places a bar on being listed on the  
page, but who decides that bar? If the bar is relatively low (which I  
would say is what Drummond proposes) -- then the list of OPs will  
likely not get much shorter -- so we have not really solved the problem.

Additionally, one could easily argue that unless a site supports some  
strong authentication such as PAPE, that we are sending people to a  
potentially risky OP. Now we are starting to take on liability for  
what is a good or a bad OP.

Perhaps instead of sending people to a site that they potentially  
need to build a new trust relationship with, that we tell users to  
ask the sites they trust to be an OP for them. This gets users to  
start asking sites to be OPs, bringing more OPs online, and as more  
sites support OpenID, it makes sense for them to market to their  
users that they are an OP and so on and so on ...

If openid.net directs people to a site, then it becomes pretty  
political because there is a small number listed, we risk liability  
of saying who to use or it is useless because so many are listed.

The number of OPs will most likely get much larger, and this problem  
will get worse.

-- Dick


On 9-Oct-07, at 11:21 AM, Scott Kveton wrote:

>> I think it is a very slippery slope for the website and/or board to
>> recommend OpenID providers without being inclusive of ALL providers.
>
> I would agree with this if we were talking about just about anything
> other than a users digital identity.  Let me explain.
>
> There have been countless blog posts and notes to the general list
> saying "if I am a user, where do I get an OpenID?"  People invariably
> end up at openid.net and then are completely stumped.  The process is
> painful at best (well, before yesterday it was).
>
> Now, if you look at the listing on the wiki:
>
> http://wiki.openid.net/Public_OpenID_providers
>
> we see 40+ sites that provide OpenID's ... now this is fair to every
> single provider out there but is completely worthless for the end
> user.  They want to click a button and end up at a provider.  Now, if
> they are coming to openid.net for a digital identity and we send them
> off to a evil/bogus/soon-to-be-out-of-business provider, how good is
> that for the user and/or OpenID as a whole?
>
> To that end, I actually like Drummond's proposal however, I don't want
> to committee this to death so that we create something that makes
> everyone happy but creates a completely confusing tool for end-users.
> I firmly believe that we need to create a tool that is easy for users
> or, no matter how inclusive it is, it will fail.
>
> - Scott
>
>