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Mozilla does a great job promoting open web standards and Firefox is the one of the best footholds the community and industry have against hegemony and stagnati

Mozilla does a great job promoting open web standards and Firefox is the one of the best footholds the community and industry have against hegemony and stagnation online. However other organizations can and do work towards the same goals. I'm one of the creators of Tent[1] which shares a lot in common with Persona (including some community members) but is more ambitious in many ways. In the Persona AAR Mozilla identified several reasons for Persona's failure to gain adoption[2] including that Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)". Tent's primary purpose is as a user data store and also supports features like address changes automatically (which Persona never did). We were fans of and friendly with the Persona team, but I believe the best solutions to these problems will come from teams that aren't afraid to think bigger than Mozilla's strategy at the time allowed. The work of federated identity solutions will continue on Tent and other projects, many of which are probably better suited for a wide variety of users and products than Persona would have been. Of course none of us have (or are likely to gain) the level of institutional (or financial) support that Persona had. [1] https://tent.io https://tent.io [2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR

username223 13y ago
Okay, spammer... > Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)" That sounds like a feature. Gathering ever-creepier amounts of personal information to serve marginally-more-effective ads is a losing game.
- wutbrodo 13y ago
  > Okay, spammer... Oh please, it's not as if Tent wasn't entirely germane to the topic of conversation. People plug their stuff all the time on HN, and as long as there's disclosure and it's relevant, I don't see the problem. Also, you're missing the fact that users aren't the ones building services. A service that doesn't attract any services is useless to users. I'm not saying that Persona fits that description, but it's a fair point to bring up in terms of the spectrum between compromise and ideological pureness.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > That sounds like a feature. Its not, really. Its more the absence of an undesirable cost -- which is an advantage to end users, only if they get the benefit, which is access to services. But if the services don't adopt it because alternative log-in schemes that offer them more (both in terms of pre-existing user base and data from that user base) then what it really offers users is a "single sign-on" with nothing to sign on to.
- furyofantares 13y ago
  That's essentially a quote from the link he provided to Mozilla talking about why Persona didn't gain widespread adoption

username223 13y ago

Okay, spammer... > Persona " can't offer the same [as Facebook Connect] incentives (access to user data)" That sounds like a feature. Gathering ever-creepier amounts of personal information to serve marginally-more-effective ads is a losing game.

wutbrodo 13y ago
> Okay, spammer... Oh please, it's not as if Tent wasn't entirely germane to the topic of conversation. People plug their stuff all the time on HN, and as long as there's disclosure and it's relevant, I don't see the problem. Also, you're missing the fact that users aren't the ones building services. A service that doesn't attract any services is useless to users. I'm not saying that Persona fits that description, but it's a fair point to bring up in terms of the spectrum between compromise and ideological pureness.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> That sounds like a feature. Its not, really. Its more the absence of an undesirable cost -- which is an advantage to end users, only if they get the benefit, which is access to services. But if the services don't adopt it because alternative log-in schemes that offer them more (both in terms of pre-existing user base and data from that user base) then what it really offers users is a "single sign-on" with nothing to sign on to.
furyofantares 13y ago
That's essentially a quote from the link he provided to Mozilla talking about why Persona didn't gain widespread adoption