[OpenID] Do users understand the concept of login domains?

Marc Canter marc at broadbandmechanics.com
Tue Dec 16 05:15:05 UTC 2008


I agree with Chris here.

danah boyd's studies have shown over and over again that ID's, profiles,
accounts and reputations are as ethereal as 'the latest fashion' to kids
today.

Those of us who understand the repercussions of building up a reputation,
investing in a profile account or whatever - is serious biz - while (I'd
bet) the majority of folks just don't see it that way.

Have a problem with an account or profile?

Just discard it and start over.

Some social networks make that hard, so folks are more careful with
Facebook.

But when faced with the fact that someone 'stole' marccanter as a handle on
Twitter - I just moved ontop a different handle.

IMHO

Once advaced utilities are available to edit, change, map or ricochet
accounts - kids (and older folks like us) will just 'wing it'.

On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 7:51 PM, Chris Messina <chris.messina at gmail.com>wrote:

> This should probably be on user-experience at openid.net, but I'll leave it
> on general@ for completeness.
>
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 2:55 PM, Eran Hammer-Lahav <eran at hueniverse.com>wrote:
>
>>
>> And now comes by question and the subject of this post: do users
>> understand
>> the concept (and implementations) of login domains? If a site presented a
>> Windows-like login dialog with place for username and input box (maybe
>> with
>> a drop-down option) for domain name, would people know what to do with it?
>>
>
> I think it depends.
> For sign-in alone, perhaps not. To retrieve some kind of necessary or
> applicable information, perhaps.
>
> I've started pointing out that the "cloud" metaphor is gaining traction
> because people are no longer JUST storing data on local harddisks. Instead,
> they're storing it online in services like Flickr and Picasa... on hard
> drives "in the sky".
>
> Eventually, you can imagine that "login domains" will come to be associated
> with information or data retrieval — and that when I want to sign in to a
> remote service with my OpenID, I will pick the appropriate one because it
> will be hooked up as a data broker to some portion of my online data. Until
> we put some kind of rationale behind picking one OpenID provider over
> another, interfaces like the Identity Selector will fail because people will
> not know how to pick the appropriate account (what happens if I have an AOL,
> Gmail AND Yahoo account for example, and I'm presented with the
> idselector.com interface?).
>
> The best way to justify this assessment is to look at Meebo. People
> understand "login domains" in that context because they want to sign in to
> one or more accounts to access certain people. If there were no resources on
> the other ends of their IM accounts, what would motivate someone to use one
> account over another?
>
> Therefore, until we get PoCo and similar services published in a reliable
> way in XRDS profiles, I think people will have no attachment to one OP over
> another.
>
> Chris
>
>
> --
> Chris Messina
> Citizen-Participant &
>  Open Technology Advocate-at-Large
> factoryjoe.com # diso-project.org
> citizenagency.com # vidoop.com
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