dready blog v2.0

I monitor a few keywords on Twitter, and get instant notification on Jabber whenever someone mentions any of them. “OpenID” is one of those. Today, I got one notification which caught my attention, not just because it is in Chinese, but that I think it’s an important point:

jchristabelle: OpenID真的很難記，我又忘了我的。

which translates to:

OpenID is really hard to remember, I forgot mine again.

I have shared that sentiment before, when I tried to login to my Plaxo account and couldn’t for the life of me remember which one it was that I first used to associate my account. Granted that, in my case, I have many OpenID URIs because I’ve been so involved in the implementation. However, it is true that the OP:RP ratio is still too high (counting Blogger as a single RP rather than thousands of OpenID-ready spam blogs.)

I think it is inevitable that in future most users will have at least a handful of OpenID URIs. One can easily imagine getting one from each webmail/IM provider, personal i-name or domain name, social networks, etc. It may just be one of those annoyances we have to live with. Or maybe users will just remember the brands that stick, and click on the “Sign in with my Yahoo! ID” button instead.

I don’t have a solution here, just relaying the message.

p.s. Incidentally, geeks are of course still able to use URIs within their control (personal domain) to delegate to another OP (e.g. Yahoo) and switch OP at anytime while keeping the original URIs. For example, here’s what I use.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 13th, 2008 at 2:47 pm and is filed under openid, xri. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.