If a single theme emerged from the recent OpenID usability summit hosted by Facebook (to which I was not invited), it is that ‘Brands’ are the key to OpenID success. Users, more than anything else, identified themselves with brands such as Yahoo!, Facebook, and MySpace, and when presented with a federated login dialog, found the logos of these providers to be the most intuitive way to login. This is the driving force behind Facebook Connect adoption.
The key to brand-driven login, of course, is Directed Identity. It’s the feature of OpenID in which the user does not enter his OpenID URI, but instead, tells the site who he would like to login with (the provider’s identifier, not the user’s). Yahoo! was the first major supporter of Directed Identity and it is the primary feature of its OpenID service.
See where I am going with this?
If Directed Identity is the technology, and Brand-recognition the philosophy to move OpenID forward, isn’t that equal to declaring bankruptcy to the vision of self-controlled and hosted identity? Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook don’t need a community. They can meet in a room and decide how they want to inter-operate. Technically, they don’t even need to inter-operate because developers can just drop 4 libraries into their sites that will do all the heavy lifting for them (Facebook-style).
Is OpenID becoming noting more than a fig-leaf for big corporations, protecting them from anti-trust, and making their locked-in products look Open?
I’m not sure why you’re making a deal out of being “not invited”; over forty people were there in person and two-hundred people on the live video stream. Not a single person who requested to come was turned away.
One of the most significant and concrete pieces of work coming out of the summit is the proposed OpenID User Interface Working Group (http://openid.pbwiki.com/OpenID-User-Interface-Work-Group-Proposal) which can be implemented by any OpenID Relying Party and Provider, big or small.
I will agree that more mainstream consumers are finding it easier to interact with OpenID via brands like Google, MySpace or Yahoo!, but not one person at the summit advocated for removing or hiding the ability for someone to use their own OpenID to sign in.
So no, you’re wrong.
The comment about not being invited was a tongue-in-cheek comment. I heard Facebook was doing some sort of a closed event about two weeks earlier and the next time I read about it was on Twitter during the event. No big deal.
I am very skeptical of a standard organization (which is what OpenID foundation is) trying to do UI work. But I will wait and see what comes out of it.
I don’t know what came out of the event, but I read the presentation so my view is limited to what went in. I think it is naive to think that just because there is a way to use your own OpenID somewhere, the presence of large brand names will not eventually move OpenID is a different direction.
Using brands isn’t innovative, it is more of the same.
An OpenID sign in interface needs to show me the appropriate brands depending on who I am and what I’m trying to do. For me that means seeing OpenID big and prominently since I use my own URL, but for my Mom that means emphasizing the Google logo since that is her main account online.