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Poll: What do you think of OpenID?
So it's been a while since openID came out, who actually uses it?
- tlrobinson 17y agoI feel like there's some options missing.
- plinkplonk 17y agoHow about a "It sucks and I will never use it" option?
- chanux 17y agoI just feel lazy to signup on your site but you have openID, I'd just give a try. And there are few sites I log in with my OpenID.
- jrockway 17y agoI like it. It's like email, but for logging into websites. (I can run my own server, or I can use someone else's. That is how the Internet is supposed to work.)
- bbot 17y agoI use the delegation <link> on my personal site to point at my openid provider, so when I sign it, it shows up as bbot.org, which is amusing. <link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" /> <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://bbot.myopenid.com/" /> I don't use it a whole lot, though, other than for livejournal commenting and stackoverflow.
- bayareaguy 17y agoI don't know much about OpenID. Is it possible to use it without knowing it?
- kniwor 17y agohttps://www.myopenid.com/tutorial https://www.myopenid.com/tutorial Is that good enough?
- modelic3 17y agoI like the idea of being able to validate my own identity.
- DanielStraight 17y agoI use it (only for StackOverflow) but I don't think it's better or worse than normal logins. Sometimes it's a pain because I always have to do extra clicks to get logged in.
- jf 17y agoOpenID login can be pretty fast if you use a client-side SSL certificate: http://joel.franusic.com/How-to-set-up-a-client-side-SSL-certificate-on-myopenid http://joel.franusic.com/How-to-set-up-a-client-side-SSL-cer...
- DanielStraight 17y agoSorry, I'm not willing to put that much (any) effort into improving my OpenID experience. I just don't care that much. I find plain logins simpler, but will use OpenID if a site wants me to.
- warp 17y agoThe benefit for me is that you get to choose who stores your password. A random website may store my password plaintext, I have no way of knowing -- so I am forced to use different passwords for each site, and manage them some way. Ofcourse, I _know_ this, but in general, users don't know and don't care. So, OpenID actually makes the web a safer place for inexperienced users, which is I think is rather important.
- whopa 17y agoExcept the phishing aspects make it worse for inexperienced users, since an arbitrary website can redirect to a page that asks for a potentially more sensitive username/password, and that's actually considered normal flow. I don't understand how anyone can promote OpenID in good conscience with this glaring hole in the design. You simply can't rely on user education.
- kogir 17y agoI've been saying this the whole time and nobody seems to view it as a serious problem. Sure, there are users who will use the same username and password on every site, and there's no hope for them. However, there is a class of users who might think with openid they can use the same credentials for their bank as they do for facebook, but not know to check for valid ssl certificates and nefarious proxying. Can someone who doesn't believe the phishing potential is real please tell me why? What am I missing?
- kniwor 17y agoGood openid providers like wordpress train their users not to expect a login page on anything a authenticating website redirects them to.
- whopa 17y agoAnd as I said in my original comment, you can't rely on user education. If we've learned anything about the psychology of phishing, it's that.
- rykov 17y agoA better question would be, for those of you who implement OpenID, Facebook Connect, etc. What's the customer percent breakdown against doing it the old fashioned (email & password) way?
- timdorr 17y agoWell, there should be a breakdown between FB Connect and OpenID. The login flow between those two implementations is drastically different.
- kniwor 17y agoIn fact, FB connect is pretty much the antithesis of openid. Openid is open, federated and gives user control. FB connect is closed, centralized and basically allows FB to play big brother.
- timdorr 17y agoActually, Facebook is very prolific in the Open Source world. They're one of the best citizens I've seen: http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php http://developers.facebook.com/opensource.php In fact, a ton of the code that runs the site itself is fully open source: http://developers.facebook.com/fbopen/ http://developers.facebook.com/fbopen/ That's mind-blowingly impressive. I still don't believe more people don't know about this or seem to care.
- kniwor 17y agoOh I know and use a lot of their open source software but what has that got to do with fb connect? "FB connect" is a session management and authentication product from facebook. I find it obnoxious. It is pretty much literally the antithesis of openid. FB open source: good, FB connect: horrible.
- zepolen 17y agoI didn't think much of it, but after using it for a week, I wish it was used everywhere. To those of you who haven't used it, try it out before condemning it. It's really nice to login with the click of a button (no typing usernames and passwords) and signing up is usually a one click action as well.
- wvenable 17y agoWhat's the best way to start for someone who doesn't want their entire internet identity tied with up Yahoo, Google, or Facebook?
- jomohke 17y agoUse another OpenID provider, such as https://www.myopenid.com/ https://www.myopenid.com/ Or you can host your own. See here for a good list: http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ http://openid.net/get-an-openid/ I initially wasn't too impressed by OpenID, but I was sold by the third site I got to use my login. It's value is really tied to the adoption by sites. It's especially nice on small blogs: you don't have post anonymously if you are averse to signups.
- bensummers 17y agoUse delegation (indirection) to use one of those providers, but with your own URL. http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-Super... This allows you to change the underlying implementation at any time.
- kniwor 17y agoAlso facebook to the best of my knowledge is not an openid provider.
- sjs 17y agoThe only option for those of us that use it is "use it on a daily basis". Pretty weak options. I am always happy when I can use OpenID on a site. It's a really low barrier and guarantees that I won't leave at the sign up form. The only reason I don't use it every day is because the sites I visit every day don't support it.
- aatif 17y agoIt's a brilliant technology. I feel uncomfortable when i don't see OpenID in the website.
- jamesbritt 17y agoI use it if have to. Prefer the choice of selecting different names/passwords for different sites.
- thwarted 17y agoI'd much rather have "login with openid" rather than seeing "login with twitter ; login with facebook ; login with posterous" or whichever subset of sites any random service thinks is most valuable to support. The great thing about login/identity/authentication standards is that there are so many to choose from. Didn't we learn the first time around with web browser capabilities to avoid this kind of fragmentation again?
- Andys 17y agoI hate OpenID, but I think OAuth is actually a good idea and a workable, practical solution.
- kniwor 17y agoOAuth and openid solve totally different problems. Openid is federated login and oauth is about authorizing access.
- aklemm 17y agoHaving a single URL that I can rely on for all my stuff on the web is going to be amazing...when it finally happens. OpenID provides the authentication component in that dream, which is key, but there is much more potential in URL-based services beyond SSO and solving 'the password problem'.
- bombs 17y agoI like to keep a list of my accounts on the web and OpenID would automate this task for me, if it weren't for the fact that most websites where I maintain an account do not support OpenID or do not make full use of OpenD (i.e. they link an OpenID URL to a traditional email/username and password based account account). As most websites that do support it — that I use — require a traditional email/username and password based account and I've yet to encounter a website that required me to have OpenID to make full use of functionality, to me, an OpenID account is the extra account I have to keep track of. Interestingly, Wildbit removed support for OpenID in Beanstalk earlier this year. (http://wildbit.com/blog/2009/05/26/what-happened-to-openid-support-in-beanstalk/ http://wildbit.com/blog/2009/05/26/what-happened-to-openid-s...)
- cschwarm 17y agoI just started using it yesterday, but I'm not quite happy. My reservation is not due to technological reasons, but to bad business models or lack of features. Gravatar support is, for example, a feature I'd like to get from my OpenID provider. After all, my image belongs to my identity. Next, with a single identity comes also privacy concerns. Automatically generated disposable E-Mail addresses for each new sign-up would be nice to have, in my opinion. Privacy concerns, however, are also related to the most common business models of these providers: It seems, nearly all of them want to display or sent me advertising. Or they want to be able to improve their advertising displays. Can't they just ask for, say, US$29 or US$39 a year? Then, I'd also need some sort of easy Identity transfer. If I switch providers, for example, the new one should be able to ask the old one for all the data and notify the consumers about the switch. Otherwise, the transaction costs of a switch would be rather high, exposing me to monopoly problems. Browser support would also be nice to have, so there's a check that I'm being redirected to my true ID provider, not just something that looks like it. Maybe, this stuff is too sophisticated for a sufficiently large number of people. But maybe, it works with the right sales pitch.
- kniwor 17y agoYour initial concerns are addressed by openid "personas". myopenid.com has them implemented and is free (or you could set up your own server to achieve it). https://www.myopenid.com/help#personas https://www.myopenid.com/help#personas Your later concerns are solved by openid delegation. Any uri you own can be made an alias of any openid you want. Thus if you switch openid providers all you need to do is edit a page you own and make it point to a new provider. https://www.myopenid.com/help#own_domain https://www.myopenid.com/help#own_domain
- ideamonk 17y agoThe only thing that makes me use open ID is the fact that I used myopenid to create my account on stackoverflow :/ Now I want and account transfer feature on stackoverflow so that I can attach/shift from myopenid to plain simple gmail id.
- brazzy 17y agoUm... that feature exists. You can attach an alternative OpenID to your account make it your main one. Just go to your user page and click on "new login" to the left of the "about me" box.
- psranga 17y agoWas skeptical of OpenID. Tried it for the first time yesterday to log into to answers.onstartups.com. I'm a believer. I used MyOpenID instead of google/yahoo etc since after reading the article about the power of google passwd that was posted here, since I expect MyOpenID to be primarily for trivial logins.
- pyre 17y agoLately I've been thinking that what we really need is something based on PGP/GnuPG. Think about it. If the browser implemented access to your keychain, then you could use your keys as login. When you 'sign up' you would just provide you public key to the website (upload or url). Then when you were presented with a login, the browser would be sent a data set to sign with your private key and send back to the server you are trying to access (which would then verify with you public key).
- jf 17y agoI've been thinking about OpenPGP based website authentication too. You should check out the web pages I have book marked under the "gpg" tag: http://delicious.com/jf/gpg http://delicious.com/jf/gpg My main frustration right now is that, aside from Bouncy Castle, all the libraries I've looked at to do cryptography seem to just be partially implemented wrappers around GnuPG.
- mstef 17y agoactually it is possible already to set up certificates and use them for authentication, in firefox you can check this under preferences/advanced/encryption
- jf 17y agoI really like client-side SSL certificates, I just hate dealing with custom root certificates. I'm excited about using the OpenPGP web-of-trust to add a "social" layer to applications. For example: "Allow any of my friends to log in to this server".
- pyre 17y agoMy main inspiration of thought along these lines is the urge to want to post things like photos online for friends/family, but I shy away from using something like Facebook to do it. The only problem with 'rolling my own' is the I don't want to necessarily make all photos world-viewable, and I don't want to force my friends/family to create an account just to view my photos. If all I had to do was grab their public key, I could then do everything behind the scenes (even creating groups so that some people can see some photos and others can't).
- chuck_taylor 17y agoOpenID in its present form will never really catch on because it's too involved and complicated for normal people to use. I am not a technologist but I'm a pretty savvy user, and I have never really understood how to use it.
- bkissel 17y agoYour readers might want to think about accepting registrations and logins from Yahoo, Google, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, AOL, Hotmail, Windows LiveID and many other accounts using JanRain's RPX, http://rpxnow.com http://rpxnow.com Additionally, users can publish their activities on a website back to social networks including Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace which increases referral traffic to your sites and facilitates subsequent logins. Clients include Sears, Kmart, Universal Music Group, EMI, Fox News, KickApps, UserVoice, Viewpoints, Get Satisfaction, Savings.com, FamilyLink, DC Shoes, Famous Footwear, and many others