OpenID

God. What a stupid idea. I mean, seriously.

I guess I should explain what I’m complaining about. I’m complaining about OpenID, the, ahem, “open and decentralized identity system, designed “not to crumble if one company turns evil or goes out of business”.” Seriously. I wouldn’t waste the pain it takes to talk in quotes on some bad joke. Which is all OpenID is, after all.

Here’s the principle of the whole thing: let’s say you create an account somewhere, like… I dunno. WordPress.com, the site hosting this blog. Then, let’s say that you want to create an account on, sayyyyyyy…. LiveJournal. Why you’d want two blogs isn’t any of my business. Let’s just say you did for some reason. You could just use your information from WordPress.com, give that to LiveJournal, and BAM, you’d be logged into one whenever you’re logged into the other.

Doesn’t this sound familiar?

And then, if you’re a website developer, you could just use the OpenID system, trusting that it verified everything, and remove some of the hassle from signing people up.

Really, I’ve heard this somewhere before.

Then, you could theoretically store specific information in your OpenID account and it’d automatically be filled in when you signed up for a new service.

Yeah, I’ve really heard this idea before…

Oh yeah.

That’s right.

MICROSOFT PASSPORT.

Yeah, that was a stunning success, wasn’t it? Everyone uses their Microsoft Passport account everywhere.  I just used it the other day to log into AltaVista.

Seriously. Why do people think that other people want to store all their stuff in one place and use that to sign up? By the time you finish figuring out how to get the OpenID to take, you’ve lost time compared to just signing up for the site straight up.

I actually tried to use OpenID the other day. I was signing up for Plaxio or some other Web 2.0 service out of boredom. It took me about two minutes to figure out how to get it to take, and then I had to do it all over again because the first attempt timed out. So it took me about four minutes to “save time” on a one-and-a-half minute process. I think just about the only thing it saved me was a confirmation email.

Yeah. Big save, there. One email versus dealing with OpenID ever again? I’ll take the email.