I always thought the intention was to be, yes, niche but -- I had honestly gotten the impression it *was* intended to become a dashboard in the long run, for a particular niche market. I haven't been following dev culture as closely as I was back in closed beta and early open beta, so it's possible that's changed. And, of course, it's also just as possible I was wrong to have gotten that impression in the first place.

I honestly wish there were better authentication protocols so that accessing and interacting with locked content cross-service weren't so ugly and difficult. But I'm not sure if that's ever going to happen, anyway. OpenID is not exactly a resounding success story, honestly -- and I don't know that anybody's going to be interested in making content on their servers super-accessible from anywhere else, from a business perspective. Even if it could be proven logically and all, with numbers/data/studies, to be better for business it still won't be an intuitive concept and that probably matters more than the hard numbers would. (And I'm not sure how easy it'd be to gather hard numbers and thus prove.)