

Ask HN: Is OpenID dead? - tonystubblebine

Between 1-2% of our users use OpenID. That's half of what it was a year ago and the drop has been pretty consistent even when we control for demographics. When we look at slightly-tech-savvy or mainstream demographics usage is almost zero.<p>What are other people seeing? What about with other options like Facebook Connect? Was there anything you were able to do to boost usage?<p>Here's the data I pulled from CrowdVine on this:
http://blog.crowdvine.com/2009/04/02/declining-openid-usage/
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watmough
I've used OpenID to access StackOverflow, and it's a somewhat disconcerting
process, involving visiting another web-site, which I do NOT want to think
about, since I want to access the visited site.

On this evidence, as Joe User, OpenID simply has too many moving parts and
will fail.

I'd be interested in what the SO experience is. Is it even possible to get on
that website without OpenID?

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briansmith
For your website, security is unimportant, so the user can just use the
password "password" that they use for all other sites where the password isn't
important. Logging into every site as brian@briansmith.org/<generic password>
is noticably more convenient than logging in with OpenID.

Logging in with a username and password is faster than logging in with an
OpenID, because the OpenID protocol requires several HTTP requests per
authentication, whereas a usernmae/password only requires one.

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qeorge
OpenID is a great idea, but the execution is off. For one, there's too many
providers, so I have to remember a weird URL just to login (myvidoop.com?
really?). The whole process is inherently awkward.

On the other hand, using your Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Yahoo login is
easy and familiar. These services don't have the openness we want, but if the
goal is to increase engagement I think its a net win.

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wmf
I expect OpenID usage to increase as sites adopt usable UIs for it, but I am
an optimist.

~~~
tonystubblebine
And what constitutes a usable UI? Have you ever seen any stats on usage jumps
between one UI and the next?

~~~
wmf
Something like <https://rpxnow.com/>

~~~
tonystubblebine
How do you know it's more usable? If you asked me to bet, I'd agree with you
that RPX would improve our adoption rate. But I also would have bet that
expanding our support to include OpenID 2.0 would have helped as well. It
didn't. I put this out there partially to see if anyone else was looking at
the hard numbers.

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kevinherron
Logging in with OpenID on StackOverflow is fairly easy for me since I've
always got my gmail account opened up in another tab. I just click the little
Google provider button and I'm logged in, no typing involved.

