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OpenID is a Royal Pain

April 7, 2008 BY Mark Evans

Openid-3
Time a mini-rant.

It seems that the OpenID bandwagon is gaining momentum as a number of major players – Google, Yahoo, etc. – climb onboard. At the same time, OpenID seems to be a cool new toy for start-ups such as Tuloo and Twitterfeed.

The problem is OpenID is a pain in the ass. It’s not user friendly, it’s confusing and, in comparison, makes remembering a user name and password a thing of beauty. Until it works a lot better, I would suggest OpenID be used sparingly and judiciously, especially by start-ups looking to convince new users to try them vs. the dozen of similar services vying for attention.

The big problem seems to be how OpenID is being implemented. Since it’s a relatively new concept, anyone introducing OpenID needs to recognize the need for education (aka hand holding) and explanations about the benefits and what’s involved in actually getting an OpenID name. Right now, too many sites just seem to be throwing it up there on the assumption people know how to use it.

There, rant over. I feel much better.

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  • http://blog.holdenkarau.com Holden Karau

    At the same time, throwing it up there in addition to traditional username & password options seems to have very little negative impact. Given that OpenId is (as you say) “a pain in the ass” the people who use it are likely early adopters, so by making it easy for them to try out your service I don’t really see any downsides.

  • http://www.stubbleblog.com Tony Stubblebine

    No need to call that a rant. It’s true, OpenID (and all the data sharing standards) could use a lot more information about UI best practices. If you or any of your readers are going to Web 2.0 Expo this month in San Francisco I’m putting together a session on that very subject. It’ll be in the Web2Open (unconference) track.

  • http://www.clickpass.com Peter Nixey

    Hi Mark,

    You might find http://www.clickpass.com to be of interest. We address a number of the issues that you describe around OpenID and do a lot of the hand-holding across all sites that support us. I hope you find it useful.

  • http://www.profy.com Cyndy Aleo-Carreira

    I think it’s less a PITA and more “OMG, change!” It was a pain explaining it to people when you had to find a service to create one, but I’m really supposed to believe there is someone out there who doesn’t have a Yahoo ID that they can use? I think it’s way easier than remembering a password for each service.