Iām sorry to say that NewsBlur wonāt be supporting OpenID anytime soon. See here for commentary: http://productblog.37signals.com/prodā¦. I remain unconvinced that it would reduce confusion and be beneficial in the long-term. Personally, I always forget which OpenID provider I used, and then I never feel like Iām part of the system. Better to stick with OAuth APIs and integrate Twitter/Facebook/anything else as a third-party add-on to your experience.
Iāve read the article at 37signals. It doesnāt give any information as to why OpenID, accepted for login at GetSatisfation (and thousands of other sites around the internet), is rejected for login at NewsBlur. Can you please give specific details that address that difference?
Complicates logging in. You need to remember if you created a login or used OpenID. Itās been six months since I last answered this question, and I am now 100% positive this will never happen. I really hate OpenID, and I implemented OAuth for many other services, so Iām well aware what the trade-offs, benefits, and real drawbacks are. Never say never, but I just had the opportunity to say it twice in this sentence.
Options are dangerous! Too many and itās confusing. I logged in at Stack Overflow with a Yahoo! account because they didnāt support Google, and now they do, and now it sucks for me. And Iāve tried changing it on Stack Overflow. Ohh, itās so painful. I have to go to another site to even use login? OpenID might be convenient for those who use it, but nobody does and itās not worth what little time I have to correctly implement a good in theory, sucks in practice protocol.
A proper way to implement it would be like what Disqus does, or what my blog Socia does. You can associate multiple accounts and link them into a single account, then use any of them to login. If one OpenID provider is down, no problem, you just use your twitter account instead. You can also have a Disqus or Socia specific password as well as a fallback. If Facebook locks your account, you can still get in with OpenID. I hate systems where all of your eggs are forced into a single basket that is under someone elseās control.
True, I wasnāt actually referring to Newsblur in particular. Thatās a different issue (one of using the same username and password at multiple places because thereās too many sites one needs usernames and passwords on, and the problems it causes such as the recent compromised accounts on PSNā¦ and the much thornier problem of password storage for individuals if they donāt reuse passwords.)
Itās more the places that only have Twitter, or only have Facebook as their authentication schemes, or ones that only allow you to have a single identity linked to an account. This is in reference to the original article posted on the subject, and on the āusing Yahoo because Google wasnāt available, and forgetting about it when Google becomes availableā issue. With Disqus, If you login with Google and it doesnāt give you an account when you know you have one, you try Yahoo then add your Google account to your identity.
And some of us want our identities on different sites to remain distinct entities and āunconnectedā. Not everyone wants every online ID they have tied into each other.
Thatās certainly an option, and Iām perfectly fine with sites supporting that. I just think that the option should be there to do it the other way. Not really the highest priority issue though.
(For example, this site. If I had to create an account to comment on this site, I probably wouldnāt even bother giving feedback. Who needs a āgetsatisfactionā account just for one site they use? Luckily it gave me the option to post using my Twitter account. For newsblur, itās a bit different. I use it enough that Iām ok with creating an account on it, but for the upcoming social features, I donāt necessarily want people following my RSS feed to need a Newsblur account to reply to my shares. If they did, theyād probably not think it worth the effort to sign up.)
The point of accepting OpenID is that then people arenāt limited to the few huge-name organisations you accept. Many of us donāt want to log in with a Facebook, Twitter, Google etc. account precisely because those organisations donāt allow us proper control over our identity.
An OpenID, on the other hand, can be had from organisations much more friendly to their users, or can even be provided by the person individually if they choose. Please let us manage our identities with the standard for doing that: OpenID.
Personally Iād prefer the dev time required to implement and support this feature be spent on other features that are actually central to the experience of the product.
Let this topic be revisted when there is nothing more interesting/useful to do.