However, the then uses his unmemorable Facebook URL http://www.facebook.com/p/Dare_Obasanjo/500050028 as an example, rather than any of the memorable ones he actually uses and people refer to, such as http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/ or http://carnage4life.spaces.live.com/ or http://twitter.com/Carnage4Life
DeWitt Clinton did an excellent job of clearing up some of Dare's other innaccuracies, but he then rhetorically exaggerated thus:
URLs make fantastic identifiers — for the 0.1% of the web population that understands that they “are” a URL. Fortunately, the other 99.9% of the world (our parents, for example) already understand that they have an email address.
This is missing the huge population of the online world (our children, for example) who consider email a messy noisy way to talk to old people, or to sign up to services when forced to, but are happy using their MySpace or Bebo or Hi5 or LiveJournal or Blogger or Twitter URLs to refer to themselves.
As I said in URLs are People Too:
The underlying thing that is wrong with an email address is that it's affordance is backwards - it enables people who have it to send things to you, but there's no reliable way to know that a message is from you. Conversely, URLs have the opposite default affordance- people can go look at them and see what you have said about yourself, and computers can go and visit them and discover other ways to interact with what you have published, or ask you permission for more.
Where I see OpenID providing a key advantage is in it's coupling with URL-based endpoints that provide more information and save the user time. The OpenID to PortableContacts connection as demonstrated by janrain can add your friends (with permission) from an OpenID login directly via OAuth.
This makes the OpenID login instantly more useful than an email one, and by connecting to an OpenSocial endpoint too, you can couple activities you take on the wider web with the site you trust to be a custodian of your profile and friends data, so your friends can discover what you are doing elsewhere, and come and join you.
I'm looking forward to talking through these issues at Internet Identity World next week in Mountain View.
1 comments:
Kevin-totally agree with you, and I'm deeply ambivalent about using emails as OpenIDs. On the one hand, it's undeniable that, at least today, and at least for the adult population, knowledge and comfort of email addresses vastly exceeds that of URLs, especially when it comes to signing into services. On the other hand, URLs make much better identifiers for all the reasons you mention, and surely the web is still "young" in terms of the right long-term infrastructure, esp. for identity. I think the trick will be for us to find a way to use the email-crutch to make OpenID more mainstream more rapidly, without selling out on its fundamental value in the process. Oh, and BTW it's "Internet Identity Workshop", not "Internet Identity World", but either way, glad you'll be able to make it! ;)
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