I am taking today off from my mini-series on debt because of something that I believe will turn out to be important. Google announced this week that they would become a provider of authentication under a scheme based on OpenID. While there are several modifications to the OpenID standard, one of them is crucial. In Google’s scheme endusers use their gmail address instead of a URL to identify themselves to accepting sites. I believe that this is a crucial step towards widespread consumer adoption. Many sites already use email addresses as the primary username, so this is something that will be very easy for consumers to get used to. Conversely, trying to change behavior and get folks to paste a URL into a username field has been the primary obstacle to consumer adoption of OpenID to date. With the new scheme consumers don’t even need to know what OpenID is or that they are using it. That has been the hallmark of the most successful standards on the net. You can use email without knowing about SMTP or POP. You can browse the web without knowing about HTTP (in fact, allowing folks to type URLs without the http:// pre-fix was an important step in consumer adoption from the very early version of browsers). So letting folks sign in without knowing OpenID is critical also. I believe Google has the right direction here. Having said that, it is unclear to me that they are proceding in a way that will result in an evolution of OpenID or in a forking. It would have been nice to see them work with the OpenID community instead of taking folks by surprise, although for all I know they tried without success.
