Plaxo sees 92% success rate with OpenID/OAuth hybrid method. Really wish I could have been at the OpenID UX Summit hosted by Facebook yesterday—sounds like an awful lot of important problems are being solved.
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Plaxo sees 92% success rate with OpenID/OAuth hybrid method. Really wish I could have been at the OpenID UX Summit hosted by Facebook yesterday—sounds like an awful lot of important problems are being solved.
I sure hope so, because I gotta say, the OpenID UX *sux* right now.
I just tried to vote on some code at StackOverFlow.com, where I'd registered using OpenID a couple months ago. Not being a frequent user, I couldn't remember which provider, and the site gave me no way to see which provider was linked to my account.
I posted a problem to that effect; they sent me to a separate user-feedback site, which allowed me to create a different account, linked to my Google account, and then still didn't recognize me as logged-in when I tried to comment on an existing post describing the problem (rather than adding a duplicate post).
A perfect storm: badly designed acct. management on StackOverflow, combined with confusing OpenID/proprietary 3rd-party/local accounts. WAY more trouble than it's worth; I messed with it for almost an hour before giving up. Most people will give up much more quickly.
I took to OpenID largely on *your* encouragement -- not that I blame you for OpenID's problems, nor StackOverflow's. Nonetheless, I got a bad taste the first several times I used it, and you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.
I read the article you linked -- sounds marginally usable if you're a GMail user, which I'm not. How this extends to arbitrary OpenID providers is still not clear.
Call me when it's fixed; in the meantime, that OpenID logo is a reminder of pain, not a beacon of hope.
Val - 11th February 2009 23:45 - #
Thanks Simon, we missed you there. :) BTW, ustream captured video of my talk about the 92% result presented: http://is.gd/jbCJ (starts at 14:30) -- I definitely feel like we're reaching the tipping point here for the Open Stack being an unambiguous benefit for users and websites alike!
Joseph Smarr - 12th February 2009 01:24 - #
Val - yuck, nightmare. It looks like StackOverflow are missing a key part of the recommended OpenID UI - a "recover my account" link which works exactly the same as "I forgot my password", e-mailing you a one-time link that lets you recover your account (and find out which provider you used).
Val - 17th February 2009 21:59 - #