Today the Live ID team wrote about their findings from the Open ID preview we had been running since PDC last November. We explored what works and what doesn’t work with the cornerstone of the Open Web, Open ID, for services with a large user base such as Windows Live which has 500+ million users worldwide.
The findings highlighted a couple of things for me:
- More work needs to be done on Open ID to make it ready for the masses. We want seamless mass adoption not mass confusion. In particular the Live ID team called out aliasing as being “unfeasible and/or just plain confusing to users!”
- The more frequently bigger players (Microsoft, Facebook, MySpace etc) get involved and contribute feedback to the Open Web communities like Open ID, the more rapidly they can move forward and shape standards that fit everyone rather than just early adopters. In essence the bigger players provide more perspective, fresh eyes if you will. We will and need to drive this behavior more at Microsoft.
- And finally, an observation that made me smile was how the Open Web drives a lot of interesting behavior with people getting envious and feeling the need to blow their own trumpets. For instance, if you look at the Open ID mailing list notice how Google can’t help but point out their efforts in this space too. It’s cute, but let’s not forget this isn’t a PR exercise this is about providing real feedback from real users whom we want to adopt this stuff. I would prefer Google to augment our feedback and provide perspective on such an announcement.
Today Microsoft and the Open ID took some great steps towards an Identity mechanism that works for the web. It’s going to be great to see this feedback worked back into the spec. After all it ain’t “my openness is bigger than your openness” it’s “our openness” and we’re not competing, we’re working together on this.