Comments on: What needs to happen for widespread OpenID adoption

By: Daniel Swiecki

Daniel Swiecki — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 03:23:29 +0000

I personally love the idea behind OpenID, but the execution and implementation of it is not what anyone could hope for at this time. What needs to and is starting to happen is a large movement to adopt OpenID in Web 2.0 services, as well as companies that you mention. Google, Yahoo, Ebay, Microsoft, all have account systems that could be replaced by OpenID accounts. I doubt however, that a company like Google, which tries to gather as much information on its users as it can in order to target its ads more accurately, would easily comply to such a radical change.

If OpenID is to succeed, it will take more than just bloggers using the wordpress openid plugin. The movement will have to catch on with the big guys or it will fail.

By: Huw

Huw — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:28:40 +0000

My concern with OpenID is that it might actually harm adoption in the short term – not something I had thought of when I wrote my last post.

The ID system is actually very different from the user/pass auth that most people are used to and expect to go through when they sign up to a new service. OpenID is arguably quite tricky to understand, and is certainly very different. It might actually dissuade people from signing up to a new service if they are required to use OpenID.

This problem doesn’t exist, however, if a user already has an OpenID and, crucially, knows that they have it. So AOL is doing a lot of good here, so long as they tell everyone that they now have OpenID.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 13 May 2007 11:12:20 +0000

The thing about OpenID is that it’s decentralised. There is no one OpenID server, anyone can set one up by downloading the server software or even writing their own code which implements the standard properly.

If one person or company’s OID server gets cracked, that will only affect users who use them as their OpenID provider. People can just switch OpenID provider if they decide they don’t like one.

That’s part of the whole point of OpenID, no one person or company owns the system.

By: Lee

Lee — Sun, 13 May 2007 11:02:56 +0000

I think that it’s a great idea, and surely it would help other companies who use it as well, as they wouldn’t have to be as concerned about security of information in their databases, although I think the problem with having just the one service is what if. If their servers get attacked then that could be your details for all websites gone, if the company disappears in a few years then we could be left with hundreds of user-based websites, but no user accounts. Although I don’t actually know how it works, I’m just assuming that on your website you use some kind of API to interact with Open ID.

I actually think the same about RSS to some extent, it is wonderful, up until a couple of months ago I ignored it thinking it was just a passing thing, although now it is brilliant, I can have all the information I want on one page, without needing to open up loads of tabs to see it. Now if you look at most people, they wouldn’t know where to start, for example, the BBC weather site, there is the ability to subscribe to an RSS feed for your area, a useful feature, the “average” computer user sees this, and using IE6 (yes, I’m sterotypicalising a lot here) clicks that link, they see a lot of meaningless XML and ignore it, there is no indication of what to do with it. So the same as Open ID, it’s there, it’s great, but as you mentioned, hardly anyone knows about it.