Dated Assumptions about "Owning" Users Stymy OpenID
With over 11,000 sites now accepting OpenID, how come Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL have limited or no support for using OpenIDs at their own sites. Why is that? Michael Arrington partially answers the question in a recent TechCrunch post. There is more to the story and it has to do with an out dated assumption about "owning" a user on the Internet.
Arrington says:
Putting my conspiracy theory hat on, it looks to me like these companies want all the positive press that comes from adopting this open standard, but none of the downside. By becoming Issuing parties, AOL and Yahoo hope to see their users logging in all over the Internet with those credentials. But they don't accept IDs from anywhere else, so anyone that uses their services has to create new credentials with them. It's all gain, no pain.
Jason Kolb adds:
Accepting them means that you're conceding that the users of your application have a home somewhere else and you're just letting them visit.
The problem for the Big 4 is that is that "having a home" or "owning" a user is as outdated an idea as possible with the Internet. Verisign is no more my "home" than any other site even though they provide my OpenID credentials. A home page is a home in name only. Home for Internet users is their bookmarks, del.icio.us tags, search toolbar and all the other tools we pull together in our browsers. I can use Google for searching and email, Yahoo for maps and movies and Microsoft for travel and am no more at home at one place or the other.
In time the Big 4 will realize that chasing the fiction of the "user home" does not out weigh the opportunity loss of adopting OpenID and helping to continue to improve it. (For more on OpenID see OpenID: Pros and Cons in the Messaging and Web Security Digital Library).
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