Yet Another Sign Up

1

A friend recommended Pocket today. Tried to sign up, got this screen:

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://amir.rachum.com/blog/2012/06/27/yet-another-sign-up/
2

Basically it goes like this:
1) Pretty much no one but engineers know what OpenID is.
2) Pretty much only engineers understand how to get an OpenID.
3) Engineers don't buy silly pointless items unless they have Princess Leia on them or somesuch. The ones who do are probably exactly not the ones interested in Open ID
4) People deciding what features to implement therefore don't really care about this demographic that doesn't buy the pointless junk they can sell dumber people at an insanely huge markup.

You should
1) Start a business where you charge people $5 to host an open id for 5 years or something.
2) Social media market the hell out of it, giving people free open ID hosting if they get X of their friends to sign up.
3) Implement and give away high quality Open ID backends for company's in-house code monkeys to hook up to their auth system in all popular web languages.

Then your itch will be scratched.

3

Mr. Anonymous: If you have a Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Blogger, or Myspace account, then you already have an OpenID. Even people who are not engineers and only use these sites have, inadvertently, acquired an OpenID *despite their not knowing how to get one*.

Your login page then needs a "sign in with Google" button. Most people can and do figure this out. They don't even need to know what OpenID *means*. They just have to click the button, type in their Google password on the Google-branded page that pops up, and they're done. No additional account required.

4

After playing with Facebook & Twitter auth last month, I have decided I will not write a site privately, and will fight with all my might professionally, that implements it's own user management.

5

Implementing OpenID really sucks

6

I'm more excited about Mozilla's Persona than OpenID: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/p.... You don't share what websites you login to with a provider (like gmail, yahoo, etc.). Here's an article about the differences between Persona and OpenID: http://identity.mozilla.com/po...

7

Let's say I want to use OpenID on this page here. It has DISQUS. I click Post As and there's a bunch of options, one is OpenID. Click and I need an OpenID URL, what is that, and my name. Well I know one of them. Think I'll sign in with Twitter instead.

8

I did it once and I totally agree!

9

OpenID is really, really hard to get right, both from an implementation and a UI / UX standpoint. It's also hard for users to understand, and it violates privacy by explicitly involving the IdP in the auth loop, so my OpenID provider knows everywhere I log in.

It's so close to being awesome, but it unfortunately failed to gain traction.

I'm working on Mozilla Persona (formerly "BrowserID") in hopes that we can use the lessons learned from OpenID and finally get over that hump. Time will tell if we make it or not. :)

10

Amir Rachum should still start this business so that the market is diversified.

11

open id really sucks