Digital Identity – Page 2

Welcoming Facebook to the OpenID Foundation

The day after Facebook’s 5th birthday, I join David Recordon and the rest of the board of the OpenID Foundation in welcoming Facebook as our newest member, in rapid succession to Paypal just a few weeks ago. The significance of both of these companies investing in and becoming part of the OpenID family can not be understated.

I’m particularly excited that Facebook has joined after the conversation that Dave Morin and I had last Friday during our Jelly Talk. Dave and I were in vehement agreement about a lot of things, and tantamount was the need for the user experience of OpenID authentication to improve.

The crux of the issue is that with OpenID, choice is baked in, which is a good thing for the marketplace and ultimately a good thing for users. The problem is how this choice manifests itself in interfaces.

Facebook Connect is simple because there is no choice: you click a button. Of course, that button only works for the growing subset of the web who have Facebook accounts and want to share their Facebook identity with the web site displaying the button, but that’s why their experience trumps that of OpenID’s. If you take away user choice, everything becomes simple.

But I believe that we can do better than that, and that we can arrive at a satisfying user experience for OpenID that doesn’t necessarily have to dispense with choice. And from the sound of our conversation on Friday, and with Facebook’s membership in the OpenID Foundation, I believe that we now have a mandate to confront this challenge head-on, as a top priority.

To that end, Facebook will be hosting the second User Experience Summit for OpenID on February 10th. The goal is to convene some of the best designers that leading internet companies can muster, and bring them together to develop a series of guidelines, best practices, iterations, and interfaces for making OpenID not just suck less, but become a great experience (in same vein as the hybrid OpenID/OAuth flow that we saw from Plaxo and Google last week, and in line with Luke Shepard’s proposals for an OpenID popup).

Although Facebook has not announced any plans for implementing OpenID specificly, their commitment to help improve the user experience suggests to me that it’s only a matter of time before all of the major social networks, in some way, support OpenID. If there were any lingering doubts about the competition between Facebook Connect and OpenID, hopefully the outcome of a successful collaboration will put them to rest.

Inaugural Jelly! Talk this Friday: OpenID vs Facebook Connect

This Friday, I’ll be joined by Dave Morin (my good friend from Facebook) at the first ever Jelly! Talk at Joe and Brian’s loft in San Francisco.

If you’re not familiar with Jelly, you should be. I call it the “gateway drug to coworking” — but it really has its own culture and identity independent of coworking, though both movements are rather complementary. Amit Gupta got Jelly started at House 2.0 in New York City back in 2006 (about two months after I initially expressed my desire to create a coworking space in San Francisco). Since then, like coworking, it’s grown into a self-sustaining movement.

Jelly! Talks is an interesting expansion on the concept — where Jellies distributed throughout the world can tune in to hear interesting and relevant talks and interact with speakers, similar to what the 37 Signals guys do with their “Live” show.

This first show I’ll be talking with Dave Morin about the relationship between OpenID and Facebook Connect — and where the two technologies are headed. This should be a pretty interesting conversation, since I’ve long tried to convince the folks at Facebook to adopt OpenID and other elements of the Open Stack (hey, they’ve got hcard already!).

Apparently the event is physically booked up, but you’ll still be to tune in remotely this Friday at 11am PST.

(Tip: The next Jelly! Talk will feature Guy Kawasaki).

What PayPal’s member in the OpenID Foundation could mean

Brian Kissel announced this morning that PayPal has joined the board of the OpenID Foundation as our sixth corporate member, with Andrew Nash, Sr., Director of Information Risk Management and a longstanding advocate for OpenID, as their representative.

That PayPal has joined is certainly good news, and helps to diversify the types of companies sitting on the OpenID Foundation board (PayPal joins Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo!). It also provides a useful opportunity to think about how OpenID could be useful (if not essential) for financial transactions on the web.

For one thing, PayPal already relies on email addresses for identification, and one of the things that I’m strongly advocating for in OpenID 2.1 is the use of email-style identifiers in OpenID flows.

Given that PayPal already assumes that you are your email address, things become more interesting when a company like PayPal starts to assume that you are your OpenID (regardless of the format). With discovery, your OpenID could be useful not just as an indicator of your data resources across the web (essential in cloud computing), but could also be useful for pointing to your financial resources. Compare these two XRDS-Simple entries (the latter is fictional):

<!-- Portable Contacts Delegation -->

    http://portablecontacts.net/spec/1.0
    http://pulse.plaxo.com/pulse/pdata/contacts


<!-- Payment Gateway Delegation -->

    http://portablepayments.net/spec/1.0
    http://paypal.com/payment/

From this simple addition to your discovery profile, third parties would be able to request authorization to payment, without necessarily having to ask you every time who your provider is. And of course no payment would be disbursed without your explicit authorization, but the point is — sellers would be able to offer a much more seamless payment experience by supporting OpenID and discovery.

The pieces are more or less in place here, and with PayPal on board, I think that we’re starting to see how OpenID can be used to smooth the on-boarding process for any number of routine tasks — from specifying where you store your photos to pointing to the service(s) that you use for payment.

I commonly use the metaphor of credit cards for OpenID. One thing that makes credit cards convenient is that the 16-digit unique ID on each card is embedded in the magnetic strip, meaning that it’s trivial for consumers to just swipe their cards rather than typing in their account number. OpenID and discovery, combined, provides a similar kind of experience for the web. I think we need to keep this in mind as we move the state of the art forward, and think about what can be accomplished once people not only have durable identity on the web — but can use those identifiers to access other forms of real-world value (and can secure them however they see fit).

Perception and reality in the land of OpenID

OpenID Logo A couple related posts caught my attention recently about OpenID. As I’m now a board member of the OpenID Foundation, I feel some responsibility for helping to inform folks about OpenID: what it is, how it’s used, why I believe that it has so much potential — and at same time, address what it isn’t, won’t or can’t be, and what the scope of the OpenID solution stack is.

The first is a post by Nick O’Neill from the Social Times blog: “OpenID Organizes the Organizers While Facebook and Google Start Letting Users Login“. It was posted on December 29th.

He begins his criticism with a slight error:

Over the weekend the OpenID Foundation announced that they are having its first election of community board members.

In fact, over that particular weekend, the OIDF announced the results of its election, not the kick off.

But his broader sentiment deserves a response:

[…while] Facebook and Google have launched their own identity services that enable users to instantly log in to any site with third-party accounts[, … the] group seems to still be in the process of organizing though. … I think the group is over planning and under executing.

Josh Catone from SitePoint picked up his point, suggesting that “OpenID Needs to Start Getting Real“. He writes:

What the OpenID Foundation needs to do is start “getting real.” Getting real is a business philosophy from 37signals, a successful web application software company based in Chicago. Though there’s a lot more to their idea, one of the main themes essentially boils down to this: stop screwing around with all the stuff that doesn’t matter and just wastes time (like politics and meetings), and start doing the stuff that needs to get done (like building your app). Don’t worry about the details until people are already using what you’re selling.

I agree with O’Neill that so far the OpenID Foundation seems to be spending too much time on organizational stuff, and not enough time on actually doing what needs to get done. In a chapter of their book “Getting Real,” 37signals talks about how meetings can kill productivity. “Every minute you avoid spending in a meeting is a minute you can get real work done instead,” they write. From my admittedly outsider’s vantage point, it appears that the people behind OpenID are getting too caught up in the organizational stuff, getting too lost in the details, and not spending enough time on execution.

My perspective, of course, is that of an outsider. I’m not privy to what’s going on behind closed doors, so to speak. So my perception of what’s really going on could be off. But at this point in the game, public perception is what it’s all about.

And therein lies the heart of the problem. Perception is reality in the land of OpenID and will shape the thinking of developers, users and those who make up the OpenID and user-centered identity communities unless we initiate a campaign to earnestly counter those perceptions.

Nevermind that for OpenID to succeed, it must be developed with the involvement of many different groups, each with slightly different ideas, objectives and release cycles. Unlike Facebook Connect, OpenID is essentially consensus technology. To advance, it must secure and maintain the buy-in and adoption of many parties on every forward step. But let’s ignore that for a moment, because that’s an issue for us to overcome.

Jim Louderback (veteran of PC Mag) recounted his miserable experience trying to sign in to Disqus with his OpenID in a post titled “I can haz OpenID?“. Apparently, he can not, since he abandoned his comment and resorted to posting it to Twitter instead. The problem apparently had to do with Clickpass, but that’s besides the point, as the experience left a serious impression (emphasis mine):

And that gets me back to OpenID. I love the idea of having one set of identification credentials that I can use around the web. If it all works right, it’ll be awesome, birds will sing and the swallows will return to wherever they’ve disappeared from. But it won’t all work right, not all the time. We’re talking software here, and the internet, and the egos of childish web developers. Occasional (or more often) fail is guaranteed.

It’s even worse than I feared. A few days after my Disqus debacle I was talking with a developer friend of mine who was bemoaning the sorry state of OpenID implementations. It seems that all the big sites have their own flavors, and the OpenID foundation just doesn’t have enough clout to force a single standard across the web.

That’s a bad state of affairs. It guarantees more fail – and also guarantees epic finger-pointing. Who will lose? The users, first, who won’t be nearly as patient nor accommodating as I am. But in the end the whole glorious promise of OpenID will be left in tatters, and we’ll be back to our walled-gardens of identification. And that’s just too bad – because an open, interoperable identity system is actually one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a long time. Too bad no one can get their act together to actually build it right.

And these are the stories that will be told and retold because it’s not the successes that are heralded — it’s the epic failures. As much as I like to rag on Twitter about OAuth, their service is a million times better than it was six months ago during the Summer of the Fail. Twitter ops deserve a lot of credit for making hard decisions about which features should be cut in order to scale the service.

But when it works, people don’t shower Twitter with praise. It’s expected. It’s only when there are problems that people raise their voices — and it’s no different with OpenID. Unfortunately it’s this cacophony of complaints that ends up shaping the negative perceptions of OpenID.

So, when the Japanese chapter of the OpenID Foundation releases figures that show significant and gaining consumer awareness of OpenID in Japan that contradict the outdated and statistically insignificant findings (PDF) that Yahoo presented last year (on which so much criticism was heaped), few seem to notice.

Progress in Japan alone isn’t enough of course. But it does suggest that there is more to the story of OpenID’s overall progress and success in the marketplace. It also suggests that OpenID has yet to succumb to Facebook Connect or that it ever will (or that that’s even the right question).

Still, what all this says to me is that the OpenID Foundation and the community at large have its work cut out for itself.

As more people begin to believe in the promise of OpenID, more people will commit themselves to the success of OpenID, taking ownership of the idea, and promoting it their friends and family (as they did with Firefox). Our opportunity is to make good on the hope that people have for OpenID and effectively channel it to challenge the bruised perception that defines OpenID today. If we succeed, changing perceptions truly will change reality.

Twitter and the Password Anti-Pattern

I’ve written about the password anti-pattern before, and have, with regards to Twitter, advocated for the adoption of some form of delegated authentication solution for some while.

It’s not as if Twitter or lead developer Alex Payne aren’t aware of the need for such a solution (in fact, it’s not only been publicly recognized (and is Issue #2 in their API issue queue), but the solution will be available as part of a “beta” program shortly). The problem is that it’s taken so long for Twitter’s “password anti-pattern” problem to get the proper attention that it deserves (Twitter acknowledged that they were moving to OAuth last August) that unsuspecting Twitter users have now exposed themselves (i.e. Twitter credentials) to the kind of threat we knew was there all along.

This isn’t the first time either, and it probably won’t be the last, at least until Twitter changes the way third party services access user accounts.

Rather than focus on Twply (which others have done, and whose evidence still lingers), I thought I’d talk about why this is an important problem, what solutions are available, why Twitter hasn’t adopted them and then look at what should happen here.
Continue reading “Twitter and the Password Anti-Pattern”

The results of the OpenID Board election are in!

I received an SMS from Michael Richardson this morning (around 8am here in Hawaii) congratulating me on my election to the board of the OpenID Foundation. It seems fitting that I should receive first word from him, since, as the Karl Rove of my campaign, he came up with the “kind of a big deal” slogan from Anchorman.

Anyway, I’m thrilled about the outcome of the election and am looking forward to working with Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, David Recordon, (each of whom received two year terms along with me) and Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton, and Brian Kissel (who received one year terms).

I’m also pleased that 80% of the 217 foundation members voted in the first-ever OpenID election. We’ve obviously got a lot of work ahead of us, but I’m very confident that we’ll make great strides in 2009.

Responding to criticisms about OpenID: convenience, security and personal agency

Chris Dracket responded to one of my tweets the other day, saying that “OpenID should be dead… it’s way over-rated”. I’ve of course heard plenty of criticisms of OpenID, but hadn’t really heard that it was “overrated” (which implies that people have a higher opinion of OpenID than it merits).

Intrigued, I replied, asking him to elaborate, which he did via email:

I don’t know if overrated is the right word.. but I just don’t see OpenID ever catching on.. I think the main reason is that its too complex / scary of an idea for the normal user to understand and accept.

In my opinion the only way to make OpenID seem safe (for people who are worried about privacy online) is if the user has full control over the OpenID provider. While this is possible for people like you and me, my mom is never going to get to this point, and if she wants to use OpenID she is going to have to trust her sensitive data to AOL, MS, Google, etc. I think that people see giving this much “power” to a single provider as scary.

Lastly I think that OpenID is too complex to properly explain to someone and get them to use it. People understand usernames and passwords right away, and even OAuth, but OpenID in itself I think is too hard to grasp. I dunno, just a quick opinion.. I think there is a reason that we don’t have a single key on our key rings that opens our house, car, office and mailbox, not that that is a perfect/accurate analogy, but its close to how some people I’ve talked to think OpenID works.

Rather than respond privately, I asked whether it’d be okay if I posted his follow-up and replied on my blog. He obliged.

To summarize my interpretation of his points: OpenID is too complex and scary, potentially too insecure, and too confined to the hands of a few companies.

The summary of my rebuttals:

OpenID will become a necessary convenience in cloud computing.
OpenID can be incrementally secured and, combined with OAuth, helps to defeat the password-anti-pattern.
OpenID is about more than just accounts and fewer passwords — it’s a building block for online identity, and therefore personal agency for web citizens.

Convenience

OpenID should not be judged by today’s technological environment alone, but rather should be considered in the context of the migration to “cloud computing”, where people no longer access files on their local harddrive, but increasingly need to access data stored by web services.

All early technologies face criticism based on current trends and dominant behaviors, and OpenID is no different. At one time, people didn’t grok sending email between different services (in fact, you couldn’t). At one time, people didn’t grok IMing their AOL buddies using Google Talk (in fact, you couldn’t). At one time, you had one computer and your browser stored all of your passwords on the client-side (this is basically where we are today) and at one time, people accessed their photos, videos, and documents locally on their desktop (as is still the case for most people).

Cloud computing represents a shift in how people access and share data. Already, people rely less and less on physical media to store data and more and more on internet-based web services.

As a consequence, people will need a mechanism for referencing their data and services as convenient as the c: prompt. An OpenID, therefore, should become the referent people use to indicate where their data is “stored”.

An OpenID is not just about identification and blog comments; nor is it about reducing the number of passwords you have (that’s a by-product of user-centered design). Consider:

if I ask you where your photos are, you could say Flickr, and then prove it, because Flickr supports OpenID.
if I ask you where friends are, you might say MySpace, and then prove it, because MySpace will support OpenID.
if you host your own blog or website, you will be able to provide your address and then prove it, because you are OpenID-enabled.

The long-term benefit of OpenID is being able to refer to all the facets of your online identity and data sources with one handy — ideally memorable — web-friendly identifier. Rather than relying on my email addresses alone to identify myself, I would use my OpenIDs, and link to all the things that represent me online: from my resume to my photos to my current projects to my friends, web services and so on.

The big picture of cloud computing points to OpenIDs simplifying how people access, share and connect data to people and services.

Security

I’ve heard many people complain that if your OpenID gets hacked, then you’re screwed. They claim that it’s like putting all your eggs in one basket.

But that’s really no different than your email account getting hacked. Since your email address is used to reset your password, any or all of your accounts could have their passwords reset and changed; worse, the password and the account email address could be changed, locking you out completely.

At minimum, OpenID is no worse than the status quo.

At best, combined with OAuth, third-parties never need your account password, defeating the password anti-pattern and providing a more secure way to share your data.

Furthermore, because securing your OpenID is outside of the purview of the spec, you can choose an OpenID provider (or set up your own) with a level of security that fits your needs. So while many OpenID providers currently stick with the traditional username and password combo, others offer more sophisticated approaches, from client-side certificates and hardware keys to biometrics and image-based password shields (as in the case of my employer, Vidoop).

One added benefit of OpenID is the ability to audit and manage access to your account, just as you do with a credit card account. This means that you have a record of every time someone (hopefully you!) signs in to one of your accounts with your OpenID, as well as how frequently sign-ins occur, from which IP addresses and on what devices. From a security perspective, this is a major advantage over basic usernames and passwords, as collecting this information from each service provider would prove inconvenient and time-consuming, if even possible.

Given this benefit, it’s worth considering that identity technologies
are being pushed on the government. If you’re worried about putting all your eggs in one basket, would you think differently if the government owned that basket?

OpenID won’t force anyone to change their current behavior, certainly not right away. But wouldn’t it be better to have the option to choose an alternative way to secure your accounts if you wanted it? OpenID starts with the status quo and, coupled with OAuth, provides an opportunity to make things better.

We’re not going to make online computing more secure overnight, but it seems like a prudent place to start.

Personal agency for web citizens

Looking over the landscape of existing social software applications, I see very few (if any) that could not be enhanced by OpenID support.

OpenID is a cornerstone technology of the emerging social web, and adds value anywhere users have profiles, accounts or need access to remote data.

Historically, we’ve seen similar attempts at providing a universal login account. Microsoft even got the name right with “Passport”, but screwed up the network model. Any identity system, if it’s going to succeed on the open web, needs to be designed with user choice at its core, in order to facilitate marketplace competition. A single-origin federated identity network will always fail on the internet (as Joseph Smarr and John McCrea like to say of Facebook Connect: We’ve seen this movie before).

As such, selecting an identity provider should not be relegated to a default choice. Where you come from (what I call provenance) has meaning.

For example, if you connect to a service using your Facebook account, the relying party can presume that the profile information that Facebook supplies will be authentic, since Facebook works hard to ferret out fake accounts from its network (unlike MySpace). Similarly, signing in with a Google Account provides a verified email address.

Just like the issuing country of your passport may say something about you to the immigration official reviewing your documents, the OpenID provider that you use may also say something about you to the relying party that you’re signing in to. It is therefore critical that people make an informed choice about who provides (and protects) their identity online, and that the enabling technologies are built with the option for individuals to vouch for themselves.

In the network model where anyone can host their own independent OpenID (just like anyone can set up their own email server), competition may thrive. Where competition thrives, an ecosystem may arise, developed under the rubric of market dynamics and Darwinian survivalism. And in this model, the individual is at the center, rather than the services he or she uses.

This the citizen-centric model of the web, and each of us are sovereign citizens of the web. Since I define and host my own identity, I do not need to worry about services like Pownce being sold or I Want Sandy users left wanting. I have choice, I have bargaining power, and I have agency, and this is critical to the viability of the social web at scale.

Final words

OpenID is not overrated, it’s just early. We’re just getting started with writing the rules of social software on the web, and we’ve got a lot of bad habits to correct.

As cloud computing goes mainstream (evidenced in part by the growing popularity of Netbooks this holiday season!), we’re going to need a consumer-facing technology and brand like OpenID to help unify this new, more virtualized world, in order to make it universally accessible.

Fortunately, as we stack more and more technologies and services on our OpenIDs, we can independently innovate the security layer, developing increasingly sophisticated solutions as necessary to make sure that only the right people have access to our accounts and our data.

It is with with these changes that we must evaluate OpenID — not as a technology for 2008’s problems — but as a formative building block for 2009 and the future of the social web.

I’m a candidate for the board of the OpenID Foundation!

The OpenID Foundation board election opened up on December 10. After a grueling nominations process (not really), we were left with 17 candidates vying for seven community board member seats. Your candidates are (alphabetized by first name):

So far, a great deal of discussion has gone on about the various candidates’ platforms on the OpenID general mailing list. Candidates have also written about things that they would like to change in the coming year on their blogs as well, notably Dave Recordon and Johannes Ernst.

For my own part, I wrote up many of my ideas when I announced my candidacy. I also maintain a wiki page of goals that I have for OpenID.

The three issues that are at the top of my list should I be elected to the board really come down to:

establishing OpenID as a strong consumer brand
improving the user experience and ease-of-use of OpenID
enhancing the value of adopting OpenID for individuals, businesses, and organizations

I will lay out my rationale for these positions in a series of upcoming posts.

In the meantime, if you’d like to vote in this election, you will need to register for a $25 year-long membership in the OpenID Foundation (basically providing you the privilege to participate in this and other foundation elections and activities).

I also solicit your feedback, concerns and wishes for OpenID. Though I have plenty ideas about the kind of work that needs to go into OpenID to make it into a great cornerstone technology for the open web, I’m also very interested in hearing from other people about their experiences with OpenID, or about their ideas for how we can advance the cause of OpenID in 2009.

Independent study on OpenID awareness using Mechanical Turk

Even though I wasn’t able to attend the eighth Internet Identity Workshop this week in Mountain View (check out the latest episode of TheSocialWeb.tv for a glimpse), I wanted to do my part to contribute so I’m sharing the results of a study that Brynn Evans and I performed on Mechanical Turk a short while ago.

I’ll cut to the chase and then go into some background detail.

Of the 302 responses we received, we only rejected one, leaving us with 301 valid data points to work with. Of those 301:

19.3% had heard of OpenID (58 people)
9.0% knew what OpenID was used for (27) and 8.0% were unsure (24)
1.3% used OpenID (4) and 18.3% were unsure if they used it (55).
5.3% recognized the OpenID icon (16) and 7.0% were unsure (21).

Combining some of the results, we found that:

of those who know what OpenID is, 14.81% use it.
of those who have merely heard of it, 6.9% use it.

That’s what the data show.

Background

Several weeks ago, Yahoo released usability research and best practices for OpenID (PDF). This research was performed by Beverly Freeman in the Yahoo! Customer Insights division in July of this year and involved 9 female Yahoo! users age 32-39 with self-declared medium-to-high level of Internet savvy.

This research, along with Eric Sachs’ later contributions (Google), have taken us from virtually zero research on the usability of OpenID to having a much more robust pool of information to pull from. And though I’m sure many would agree that this research only points to opportunities for improvement, many people interpreted the results as an indication that “OpenID is too confusing” or that it “befuddles users“.

A lot of people also took cheap shots, using the Yahoo! results to bolster their long-held arguments against the protocol and its unfamiliar interaction flow. The problem with such criticism, as far as I’m concerned, is that generalizing from the experiences of nine female Yahoo! users in their thirties is not necessarily representative of the web at large, nor are the conditions favorable to such research. Y’know, Ford got a lot of flack too when he introduced the Model T because everyone loved their horse and carriages. Good thing Ford was right.

Now, some of the criticism of OpenID is valid, especially if it can be turned into productive outcomes, like making OpenID easier to use, or less awkward.

And it serves no one’s interests to make grandiose claims on the basis of minimal data, so given Brynn’s work using Mechanical Turk (with Ed Chi from PARC), I thought I’d ask her to help me set up a study to discover just what awareness of OpenID might be among a wider segment of the population, especially with Japanese awareness of OpenID topping out around 28% (with usage of OpenID at 15%, more than ten times what we saw with Turkers).

Mechanical Turk Demographics

First, it’s important to point out something about Turker demographics. Because Turkers must have either a US bank account or be willing to be paid in Amazon gift certificates, the quality of participants you get (especially if you design your HIT well) will actually be pretty good (compared with, say, a blog-based survey). Now, Mechanical Turk actually has rules against asking for demographic or personally identifying information, but some information has been gathered by Panos Ipeirotis to shed some light on who the Turkers are and why they participate. I’ll leave the bulk of the analysis up to him, but it’s worth noting that a survey put out on Mechanical Turk about OpenID will likely hit a fairly average segment of the internet-using population (or at least one that doesn’t differ greatly from college undergraduates).

Method

Over the course of a week (October 19 – 26), we fielded 302 responses to our survey, paying $0.02 for each valid reply (yes, we were essentially asking people for their “two cents”). We only rejected one response out of the batch, leaving us with 301 valid data points at a whooping cost of $6.02.

Findings

As I reported above, contrary to the 0% awareness demonstrated in the Yahoo! study of nine participants, we found that nearly 20% of respondents had at least heard of OpenID, though a much smaller percentage (1.3%) actually used it (or at least were consciously aware of using it — nearly everyone (18%) who’d heard of OpenID didn’t know if they used it or not).

There was also at least some familiarity with the OpenID logo/icon (5.3%).

What’s also interesting is that many respondents, upon hearing about “OpenID”, expressed an interest in finding out more: “What is it? LOL.”; “I’ve gotta look it up!”; “This survey has sparked my interest”; “Heading to Google to find out”. I can’t say that this shows clear interest in the concept, but at least some folks showed a curious disposition, as such:

How can I tell for sure whether I’ve used OpenID or not when I don’t know what it is? I’ve surely heard of it. That confuses me mainly in Magnolia {bookmarking service} where I want to sign up, but I can’t as it asks for OpenID. And until you mentioned above, it simply didn’t occur to me to just search it up. Hell, after submitting this hit, I’m going to do that first and foremost. Anyways, thanks a lot for indirectly suggesting a move!!!

Now, I won’t repeat the other findings, as they’ve already been reported above.

Thoughts and next steps

The results of this survey are interesting to me, but not unexpected. They’re not reassuring either, and they tell me that we’re doing well considering that we’ve only just begun.

Consider that 20% of a random sampling of 300 people on the internet had at least heard of OpenID, before Google, MySpace or Microsoft turned on their support for the protocol (MySpace announced their intention to support OpenID in July).

Consider that nearly a year ago Marshall Kirkpatrick sounded the deathknell of what seemed like the forgone conclusion about OpenID:

Big Players are Dragging Their Feet … Sharing User Info is a Whole Other Matter … Public Facing Profiles are Anemic … Ease of Use and Marketing Clarity Remain Low Priorities

Consider that no concerted effort has been made to date to inform or educate the general web population about OpenID, or about the problems with sharing your user credentials all over the web, and that many of the large providers have yet to turn on their OpenID support (despite all coming to the table and agreeing that it’s the way forward for identity on the web (save, as usual, Facebook, looking more Microsoftian by the day).

Consider also that momentum to rev the protocol to accommodate email addresses in OpenID is just now gaining traction.

In other words, with areas of user education becoming obvious, with provider adoption starting to happen (vis-a-via MySpace demonstrating the value and prevalence of URL-based identifiers) and necessary usability improvements starting to take shape (both in terms of the OpenID and OAuth flows being combined, and in terms of email addresses becoming valid in OpenID flows), we’re truly just getting started with making OpenID ready for mainstream audiences. It’s been a hard slog so far, and it’s bound to continue to be challenging, but the shared vision for where we’re going gets clearer every time there’s an Internet Identity Workshop.

I plan to re-run this study every 3-6 months from this point forward to keep track of our progress. I hope that these numbers will shed some much-needed balanced light on the subject of OpenID awareness and adoption — both to demonstrate how far we have to go, and how far we’ve come.

OpenID usability is not an oxymoron

Monday last week marked the first ever OpenID UX Summit at Yahoo! in Sunnyvale with over 40 in attendance. Representatives came from MySpace, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Vidoop, Janrain, Six Apart, AOL, Chimp, Magnolia, Microsoft, Plaxo, Netmesh, Internet 2 and Liberty Alliance to debate and discuss how best to make implementations of the protocol easier to use and more familiar.

John McCrea covered the significance of the summit on TechCrunchIT (and recognized Facebook’s welcomed participation) and has a good overall summary on his blog.

While the summit was a long-overdue step towards addressing the clear usability issues directly inhibiting the spread of OpenID, there are four additional areas that I think need more attention. I’ll address each separately. Continue reading “OpenID usability is not an oxymoron”