OpenID and email

VeriSign’s Nico Popp discusses Google’s latest OpenID provider. Nico is convinced it’s a good move — God knows I’ve always claimed URLs make bad user identifiers — and be that as it may, but the arguments are flawed.

Nico claims

“The beauty is that Google did not even have to force a button or any branding on relying party web sites,”

which is in itself true, but what he skips is that the relying party has to amend how it processes discovery on given user identifiers. So either way, the RP has to do extra work. Nothing is free.

Nico continues

“The choice of identifier alone will make it easier for consumers to choose Google over FaceBook,”

but that only makes sense right now. The Facebook platform already is a de facto email network. It only takes FB a little bit of work to provide external email identifiers like alice@facebook.com, and whatever work has been done for @gmail addresses now works for FB, too, providing there is some sanity to the discovery phase.

And FB can do this without providing any external email services for their users at all.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Comments

[Jason]

I don't understand what makes a uri or an e-mail address any better or worse (as compared to the other).

People identify themselves by their domain, or by their geocities homepage, or their blog address, or whatever.

Entering in their url gets you to them. All the same as an e-mail.

Secondly, telling Facebook users to go use xyz@facebook.com will seriously confuse and piss of a lot of users if there's no e-mail service running at that location.

People still don't know what OpenID is, so when they start using an e-mail address for other purposes and they never get an answer back, pissed off users will start to exist.