Again: What's the good in OpenID for me?

Dan Lyke danlyke at flutterby.com
Mon Dec 8 23:49:12 UTC 2008


On Mon, 8 Dec 2008 18:41:57 -0200
"Márcio Vinícius Pinheiro" <marcioviniciusmp at gmail.com> wrote:
> in the end what's the benefit of OpenID for me?

I wrote what I believe to be the first third party implementation of
LID, a single sign-on and identity solution developed by Johannes
Ernst, who's now a big OpenID backer. I also wrote an early conformance
suite for YADIS, a component of OpenID.

With a background like that I should support OpenID on all of my web
sites, I should be singing its praises far and wide, heck, I've got an
OpenID capable URL on a domain name I control, I should be using that
to sign in to all of the OpenID consumers out there on the net (I think
there's two of them, and I only use one...).

I don't do any of those things, and I think it's worth pursuing why.

First, as you say:
> How can I make Yahoo know that "mviniciusmp" on Yahoo' systems is the
> same of "marcioviniciusmp" on Google' systems? I still have different
> accounts. I have many OpenIDs just because they invited me to create
> separated IDs.

Yep. There are very few OpenID consumers. Everyone wants to own your
identity, nobody wants to use it. There are plenty of political reasons
for this, but there's one big technical reason: At least as of the
last time I looked, log in to my site with an OpenID URL, and can't get
a human readable name for you. And nothing looks stupider than:

On 7 Dec 2008 at 16:43, http://some.long.url/asdf.aps?7iu9fsd9 wrote:

So even if I use my OpenID login, I still have to create an identity on
that remote site, and at that point copying and pasting a string and
then going through some long redirect back and forth is more work than
me saying "oh, boy, another discussion forum, yeah, we'll use a
slightly modified domain name as a password and carry on."

I had great hopes for OpenID, and I still think it can be cool, but the
direction it's gone isn't a direction that's useful for me, and isn't a
direction that excites me about evangelizing for it, and I'm still
trying to figure out why.

Dan




More information about the user-experience mailing list