Everyone has a username for everything these days. I have email addresses @hotmail.com, @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, @yale.edu and several other places. I believe I have one at SourceForge, which I’ve never checked. On top of those I log in to about 20 more places, like facebook, last.fm, my bank, del.icio.us, all the yale sites like Student Info Systems or WebMail.
Such a world presents two large problems and many smaller ones. Of course, the first is security. We all known how having so many logins leads to enormous security problems. Yale just realized this and led a long and arduous campaign to force everyone to change their passwords and not tell anyone. Duh you might say. I’d say at least 8 of my Yale friends have told me their passwords, even though I never ask. Much has been made of the issue, and many security solutions already exist. I’m not too worried.
I am more worried about how much of a nuisance it is to the user. My @gmail username lets me into about 30 different services, from pictures, web site analytics, even Blogger which I’m using right now. Much of my decision to use Google’s services depends on the ease of using that account for everything I do. For that reason, the current giants (Google, Yahoo!, and to a lesser extent Microsoft) will remain giants. Google became great as a start up, and other starts up have as much potential as Sergey and Larry did then.
OpenId aims to solve that problem. In their words
OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity.
Such explanations currently prevent any non-technical user from using the service. Basically, the idea is that every individual gets a unique name. That name could then be used to log in to any website that supported it. One user would have one name and one password. Hi, I’m SamS. I can control whatever I want on that page, but more importantly, no one else can have it ever. When you leave school, switch jobs, switch internet providers, your identity comes with you. I will also tell you that technically the specs work. Several sites already work, but of those I have only heard of 2 or 3.
We need a giant to embrace the idea, but none has, and I don’t think any will. Google knows that familiarity drives users to its services when they might otherwise not use them. It is not in their interest to support such an idea. So two options remain: wait for Google to decide this area deserves their benevolence (don’t hold your breath) or to cause adopting the service to be in Google’s interest.
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