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Why Yahoo Might Just Save OpenID
Written by Allen Stern - January 30, 2008
Yahoo has rolled out a beta of their Yahoo ID program which is basically a version of OpenID. Currently 920 applications are set to use the Yahoo ID program.
This could help to lead rapid adoption of the OpenID initiative as average Internet users have no idea how to setup or use an OpenID, but using their Yahoo ID is nice and easy. Mr. Ostrow agrees with my take.
I still believe that if OpenID is going to work, it's going to take better marketing and adoption strategy rather than more technical rollouts. It's a great idea, but without marketing force and education behind it, OpenID won't go anywhere.
There is a flip-side to using a company as your OpenID provider versus creating your own. What happens if the provider (Yahoo in this case) goes out of business, changes policies that you don't agree with or you just want to switch? How easy will this be?
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OpenID is suffering from a huge marketing problem, IMO. There needs to be better explanation on all sides of what OpenID is and why anyone should care about it before people other than hardcore geeks start using it.
I have accounts on a couple of providers who "support" OpenID, and I have no idea what that really means or how it works, nor why using OpenID would be better or worse than my normal login. Absent that, I just ignore OpenID and keep using my regular login accounts.
Allen, you could use a nifty feature of OpenID called Delegation. It basically means that you use the URL of your blog - http://centernetworks.com - and delegate to your provider. All you have to do is adding two lines of HTML to the Head section of your site. So whenever you don't feel comfortable with your provider anymore, you just change those two lines and you can still use http://centernetworks.com as your OpenID.
Yahoo has another issue - mybloglog kept me logged in via my cookies and showed me on NEW sites I was visiting - ie I'd never been to these sites before but there I was showing as a reader - despite that I was physically logged out. I asked Yahoo about it and their customer service response was that the whole point of mybloglog was to keep track and show the community. Well, not when I'm logged out it should not. I had to delete my entire cache and history (which reallllly annoyed me) in order for me to stop showing up on every site mybloglog widget was implemented. They need to straighten this out before they start bundling my stuff into 1 ID they control.
While it's great that Yahoo is getting behind OpenID, their implementation is pretty awful. I wrote about it extensively here:
http://tlrobinson.net/blog/?p=33
Allen,
If Yahoo, Google, et al can't make OpenID work, then it's doomed. In other words, 2008 will be the year OpenID flourished, or it will disappear, thanks for coming out, etc.
you are 100% correct.
Said as much here in this piece on OpenID a couple of weeks back:
http://brijit.wordpress.com/2008/01/17/small-and-independent-publishers-rejoice-openid-will-set-you-free-maybe/
Hope you're well.
-Jeremy from Brijit
As long as janrain and the rest of the OpenID community can prove that the technology is secure, and that having one password for everything is OK, its a go!
-Jeffrey