Been there. Done that again. Read this story. Doesn’t it sound old and familiar? This doesn’t represent innovation or new thinking.
Interop - single sign on - dual-headed clients. Sign up once and get an open ID into the web.
Ever hear of Microsoft Passport?
How about AOL’s Magic Carpet?
Or Sun Open SSO?
Or Google Talk and AIM cooperation and interop?
Or any one of a number of industry combines that have all failed? Google wants to do it. Microsoft wants to do it. IBM wants to do it. Now Facebook wants to do it, too. AOL wanted to do it, too. In fact, I ran Magic Carpet operations at AOL. So good luck with that!
Fact is, single sign on is hard to do and some companies don’t want to cooperate. Wait til eBay and Amazon get wind of this. Think they will allow for non registration to get into their secure environments? PayPal?? Credit cards and banks? I don’t think so.
E-commerce sites? Nope.
These kinds of efforts also try to advantage a single company without taking into consideration why a consumer wants to do it and why partners in the network are advantaged.
The kinds of systems that seem to work are simple, easy to use and non-obtrusive. The best example I can think of is AddThis, a part of Clearspring, a company of which I am Chairman. A little baby piece of chrome - elegant, light, fair - makes life easy for a consumer and sits atop and supersets multiple popular sites for the benefit of a user. Check it out and AddThis.com. We don’t want to take over the world. We don’t want to have huge strategic ambitions. We just want to help - in little baby bites - a consumer with a simple little helpful tool.
AddThis is the number one site for these services on the planet. It is all about sharing, 20 billion times per month. Yes, that is correct. That is the number. Check it out for yourself.
No ulterior motive. No designs on winning the web. Just a simple, fair, easy way to share with the consumer in mind. Check it out. See why I am so proud of this company and product.
seems like may be user-side app. Friend Wayne turned me on to app called PassworsdSafe. Looks like it may be good when I take time to learn it. Wayne offered app when I told him my current ID/password protection was to keep them in a .doc named “A Lovely Poem” thinking name as something no user would ever open
I think it’s solid.
Facebook may want to put all those efforts into re-imaging internal mail. Might just come up with something that blows us away and solidifies their postion and sucess going forward.
Congrats on Game 7; Love It. – Jeff
old-is-new;
Allll the Yoouunng Duuuuuudeeees.
Caaaaryyy the Neee-eeeeeewwwwwss.
Alll The Young Duuuuddeees.
Caarryyy the Neeeeewwwwsss.
- Jeff
Obviously we are headed towards this, but I don’t see it happening particularly soon. The problem, from a user standpoint, is that most people already have established accounts at most of the popular websites and are hesitant to start over or go through the hassle of moving media and/or profiles. I think the most viable solution is a stand-alone user-side client similar to the “save password” feature in browsers that provides additional security (biometric perhaps?).
Ted:
I think that the article here misses the point of OpenID (and maybe Facebook is missing the point, too, by wanting to use it). For me, the benefit of OpenID is for the smaller guys out there. I think about it this way… If I create a new site tomorrow and want people to sign up (check out stackoverflow.com, a new site I use a lot), getting my users to put all of their information into my site (which they probably don’t really trust) is going to be a tall order indeed, especially if all I want is an authentication service.
So I think OpenID has its place, and democratizes the process of authentication for a lot of websites without tying each site to a particular vendor (Passport, etc). Ultimately, it makes for more innovation, quicker. But I agree that there’s little value in having a big behemoth site like Facebook with millions of subcribers use OpenID for authentication.
Oh and by the way. Go CAPS!
Is there anything you don’t have a hand in?
I recently started incorporating AddThis into one of my websites.