On the OpenID Controversy
Monday, March 15th, 2010 11:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charmianThere's a suggestion on the DW Suggestions comm about automatically putting in a LJ OpenID login form when posts are crossposted to LJ. I'm in favor of the general sentiment that OpenID is not really intuitive to the average user, and inconvenient besides (especially compared with Facebook Connect and the Twitter login), though I'm not sure this is the only way to deal with the issue.
As previously noted in this journal, even leading figures of open standards movements are deeply aware of this shortcoming of openID. In an online world where many, many people are fuzzy on the concept of an URL, why are we surprised that OpenID is seen as an insanely complex, inconvenient thing? Because OpenID is a standard rather than a site that people are familiar with, its brand is weak. Many people are not familiar with it, and probably, this leads to a lack of trust. That's why more people probably will use Facebook Connect over OpenID, even if they have something that would work with OpenID.
Obviously, these things are influenced by the intended audience of the blog. If a blogger is attempting to get a general audience, something like Intense Debate or Disqus might be the best. (However, for DW, such bloggers are probably few and far between. Many people are implicitly blogging mainly for other DW users, or LJ users, and keep a separate blog (or blogs) for general audiences or audiences on other sites). As far as this blog goes, most of the content by default is going to be read by a DW-only audience, although I have no problem with non-DW users reading it; I'm not sure how much mileage I would potentially get out of having one-click login buttons for other ID systems. Anyhow, more saliently, though, I don't crosspost any of the content here to LJ, which makes me different from a fair amount of DW users, who do indeed do so.
One of these crossposting users made the suggestion, and I think from their perspective, the proposed solution does make sense, although it seems that there are arguments against the practice. I have to wonder, could S2 be hacked so that there could be a blank for an LJ username with appropriate labeling? The issue seems to be that there is no "ENTER LJ USERNAME HERE" blank. Perhaps if the journal owner could (I am not versed in S2 so I have no idea whether this is do-able) put like a note saying "enter in yourname.livejournal.com here to comment as LJ user" the problem would be alleviated somewhat. Or is there a way to do with S2 something like this Wordpress plugin? Now, I think the plugin overloads people with choice a bit, but I assume there's a way to prune the options.
As previously noted in this journal, even leading figures of open standards movements are deeply aware of this shortcoming of openID. In an online world where many, many people are fuzzy on the concept of an URL, why are we surprised that OpenID is seen as an insanely complex, inconvenient thing? Because OpenID is a standard rather than a site that people are familiar with, its brand is weak. Many people are not familiar with it, and probably, this leads to a lack of trust. That's why more people probably will use Facebook Connect over OpenID, even if they have something that would work with OpenID.
Obviously, these things are influenced by the intended audience of the blog. If a blogger is attempting to get a general audience, something like Intense Debate or Disqus might be the best. (However, for DW, such bloggers are probably few and far between. Many people are implicitly blogging mainly for other DW users, or LJ users, and keep a separate blog (or blogs) for general audiences or audiences on other sites). As far as this blog goes, most of the content by default is going to be read by a DW-only audience, although I have no problem with non-DW users reading it; I'm not sure how much mileage I would potentially get out of having one-click login buttons for other ID systems. Anyhow, more saliently, though, I don't crosspost any of the content here to LJ, which makes me different from a fair amount of DW users, who do indeed do so.
One of these crossposting users made the suggestion, and I think from their perspective, the proposed solution does make sense, although it seems that there are arguments against the practice. I have to wonder, could S2 be hacked so that there could be a blank for an LJ username with appropriate labeling? The issue seems to be that there is no "ENTER LJ USERNAME HERE" blank. Perhaps if the journal owner could (I am not versed in S2 so I have no idea whether this is do-able) put like a note saying "enter in yourname.livejournal.com here to comment as LJ user" the problem would be alleviated somewhat. Or is there a way to do with S2 something like this Wordpress plugin? Now, I think the plugin overloads people with choice a bit, but I assume there's a way to prune the options.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 06:23 pm (UTC)Definitely something needs tob e done, not sure using the crossposter is necessarily the best idea.
Blogger, and a bunch of other platforms, now have a dropdown set for a bunch of OpenID logins, which work well. That's roughly what I'm looking for.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 08:13 pm (UTC)http://godplaysdice.blogspot.com/2009/12/uniquely-identifying-people-by-birth.html
no subject
Date: 2010-03-16 10:56 pm (UTC)Yeah, there seem to be so many things that could go wrong.
I think that would help, as an option, although maybe more for those who have a diverse audience, but for someone who has only LJ and DW regular commenters, I can see how they would want something more like the suggestion.