It might be worth it to revisit this idea in 2011, but I think the motivation for this exercise largely depends on where the OpenID Foundation wants to take the brand — and whether consumer awareness matters as much to its proponents as it had the potential to, say, in 2008.

“I plan to re-run this study every 3-6 months”

Did you? Any more plans in this direction?

Re “Yahoo users should use their yahoo email address (or just yahoo.com) as their OpenID.”

That’s an interesting point. Although the OpenID login process now allows me to put in the shorthand ‘yahoo.com’ instead of remembering my flickr URL, … should I really consider ‘yahoo.com’ to be my OpenID? Isn’t it your OpenID too? and the OpenID of every other Yahoo user. I can see this causing confusion…

The Mechanical Turk “database” will surely have some bias (as will all convenient samples)—this is a common (yet valid) criticism. @Rod’s point is even more valid: I actually hadn’t thought of testing OpenID awareness against a baseline. My other concern going forward is if we continue to use MTurk for testing, our sample may become increasingly biased after having seen this survey posted in the first place. On the other hand, a number of users reported wanting to learn more…so in the end, this may be a great way to educate the community about OpenID!

A final word on Mechanical Turk demographics: I’ve run several other studies on MTurk and can attest to the diversity (and general non-tech savvy) of the community. Although they tend to be slightly betted educated than your average American, they are definitely a different cohort than you people reading this post