In the past five days or so I've seen three different posts on the web where somebody has either confused OpenID and OAuth or expressed confusion as to how they differ. I'm not going to name names or point to URLs. I'd prefer to try to fix the problem.

Therefore, here's a simple, and hopefully clear and accurate, guide to the purposes of and differences between the two systems. If I had a video camera, I'd act out the sock puppet version for you. But I don't, so you have to read this instead.

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Topics: technology/oauth, technology/openid

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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.

(Read more...)

Topics: technology/openid, thinking

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When Simon Willison started to do a lot of publicity work for OpenID last year, I figured it was probably the right time to at least learn as much about it as possible and start trying things out. Just over a year later and, whilst as a technical specification and a service it shows a lot of promise, as something for users, it doesn't seem to be there quite yet.

Lately I've been looking a lot at the user experience. Whenever possible, I've been using OpenID logins on sites that allow it for comments. I've also been noticing sites that aren't OpenID-enabled when they really should be. My feelings have been mostly ones of disappointment. The user experience doesn't end up being very inviting as a rule and I'm gradually arriving at the point where I'm nervous about using OpenID because it's misused so often. Time to draw a few conclusions.

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Topics: technology/openid, thinking

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