Thu 27 Dec 2007

OpenID and Google's Blogger

Last month, I wrote a quick summary of some of my experiences trying out OpenID support in various places. At the time, I noted that Google didn't have any OpenID support in blogger.

At the end of November, they announced support for it, although I only noticed this last week. As you can see from the varied comments on that article (warning: more noise than signal at times), this hasn't been met with universal approval, mostly because of the trade-offs requires for usability.

Today, I wanted to leave a comment on a blogger-hosted blog and I tried out this new feature. Google do not get a passing grade.

It started out well. I could select any provider, and since my website delegates for me (to claimID as the service provider), I used that URL. I typed my comment and, wary of my earlier tragic LiveJournal experience, hit the preview button first. Had to log in, no problems. Was asked for a nickname and full name, no problems. Comment was previewed using the nickname I provided and made it a link to my OpenID URL. Looks good; Google were scoring very well here and I was mentally composing this post along the lines of "Google shows that implementing OpenID is not that hard." Hit post and the wheels fell off...

Oh, dear. Apparently, my nickname is now blog. If Blogger stores that as my account so that I don't have to type the information in again, that bug has just screwed me over permanently. I've written before about how my OpenID is not the same as my personal name or even the human-readable nickname I might choose to be known by. The displayed name is something that sites supporting OpenID must get right if they want to seem useful.

Seriously, how hard can it to test normal delegation when setting up an OpenID service?? I did the normal process — preview, login, submit — and they screwed it up. Unfortunately, this hardly seems to be atypical. OpenID already has usability problems, as I mentioned in my earlier post, and I say that as somebody who desperately wants it to succeed. If sites providing OpenID support continue to mess things up like this, to the point that somebody with my technical skills is nervous about using the technology, what hope does it have of wide acceptance?

OpenID isn't a working technology when it only works with livejournal, wordpress and a few other sites. That's not what the spec says. Sadly, though, that's what the implementers seem to believe. I can't find any links on the OpenID website to tests OpenID consumers should run against their sites. This is starting to annoy me enough that I might have to scratch my own itch here and write some documentation, but it's going to require wading through tons of email archives, etc, to verify that the system isn't broken by design/consensus (what if they all fell down and hit their heads and really don't think a displayed name is important?)

Topics: technology/openid, thinking