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I know nothing about OpenID. So I went to their website: This is their tagline: "OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital ide

by uuilly 19y ago

I know nothing about OpenID. So I went to their website: This is their tagline: "OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." blah blah ...user centric... blah How about: OpenID allows you to have one login for multiple sites. This is the paragraph after the tagline: "OpenID starts with the concept that anyone can identify themselves on the Internet the same way websites do-with a URI (also called a URL or web address). Since URIs are at the very core of Web architecture, they provide a solid foundation for user-centric identity." I don't even know where to begin here. This is all a long way of saying that I think the upside of supporting OpenID is very small. It may be a brilliant idea, brilliantly excecuted but few will use it b/c it is so poorly explained. Making users feel stupid is a bad way of getting them to use your stuff. Open or not.

nickb 19y ago
Well said. OpenID seems to be the latest fad that will more than likely fizzle out unless big sites start pushing it. And I don't see that happening in the near term since they all prefer to have your email so they can "market" stuff to you.
- mechanical_fish 19y ago
  Also well said. And it's worse than that - when you allow your users to log in with OpenID, you don't just give up the marketing value of their email - you give it away to a random third party somewhere on the Internet! Your customer's OpenID provider gets to know her email, her personal information, the sites she visits, the exact times and dates of every login to those sites, even her passwords. The provider also gets to show the user a page at a critical time - the time just before the user signs on to a new site. (Or is it every time the user logs in? God, what a bonanza that would be.) This is the kind of information and access that Google has turned into billions of dollars - only it's potentially more detailed, and more complete. It sounds like a DoubleClick executive's dream come true. No wonder that every big Web company is falling over itself to become an OpenID provider, even though very few sites actually support OpenID logins. What's the average business willing to pay for an ad on its competitors' actual login pages? We may soon find out. So, yeah - without even getting into the potential security issues, the very real user-confusion issues, and the terrifying ten-percent-of-my-users-can't-login-because-of-a-bug-on-someone-else's-site, now-wtf-do-I-do? issues, I'm not sure how many sites outside the Geekosphere are ever going to support OpenID.
pg 19y ago
Perhaps a startup will come along and make OpenID easy...
- uuilly 19y ago
  It's a shame if a seemingly good project would have to be re-created only to be topped off w/ basic customer awareness. I think a lot of open source projects suffer from this mentality. Take the "open, community, GPL, Torvalds" stuff off of your landing page. Your users aren't joining a cult, they're using your product. Like Levchin said, there should be a "Get Mine Now!!!" button. Firefox and Ubuntu are doing well because they are catering to the "Get Mine Now" crowd (which is everyone who isn't a developer.) But on the other hand, maybe there is a great startup that could take the OpenID concept to the next level. I don't know b/c I don't really understand what they do! :)
- Tichy 19y ago
  I haven't tried OpenID yet, but my expection would be to just run apt-get on my Linux server to install some OpenID-server, put my name into a configuration file or whereever (web interface), and use a single login from then on.

by uuilly 19y ago

nickb 19y ago

Well said. OpenID seems to be the latest fad that will more than likely fizzle out unless big sites start pushing it. And I don't see that happening in the near term since they all prefer to have your email so they can "market" stuff to you.

mechanical_fish 19y ago
Also well said. And it's worse than that - when you allow your users to log in with OpenID, you don't just give up the marketing value of their email - you give it away to a random third party somewhere on the Internet! Your customer's OpenID provider gets to know her email, her personal information, the sites she visits, the exact times and dates of every login to those sites, even her passwords. The provider also gets to show the user a page at a critical time - the time just before the user signs on to a new site. (Or is it every time the user logs in? God, what a bonanza that would be.) This is the kind of information and access that Google has turned into billions of dollars - only it's potentially more detailed, and more complete. It sounds like a DoubleClick executive's dream come true. No wonder that every big Web company is falling over itself to become an OpenID provider, even though very few sites actually support OpenID logins. What's the average business willing to pay for an ad on its competitors' actual login pages? We may soon find out. So, yeah - without even getting into the potential security issues, the very real user-confusion issues, and the terrifying ten-percent-of-my-users-can't-login-because-of-a-bug-on-someone-else's-site, now-wtf-do-I-do? issues, I'm not sure how many sites outside the Geekosphere are ever going to support OpenID.

pg 19y ago

Perhaps a startup will come along and make OpenID easy...

uuilly 19y ago
It's a shame if a seemingly good project would have to be re-created only to be topped off w/ basic customer awareness. I think a lot of open source projects suffer from this mentality. Take the "open, community, GPL, Torvalds" stuff off of your landing page. Your users aren't joining a cult, they're using your product. Like Levchin said, there should be a "Get Mine Now!!!" button. Firefox and Ubuntu are doing well because they are catering to the "Get Mine Now" crowd (which is everyone who isn't a developer.) But on the other hand, maybe there is a great startup that could take the OpenID concept to the next level. I don't know b/c I don't really understand what they do! :)
Tichy 19y ago
I haven't tried OpenID yet, but my expection would be to just run apt-get on my Linux server to install some OpenID-server, put my name into a configuration file or whereever (web interface), and use a single login from then on.