OpenID usability
October 5th, 2008 by 
Phil
People complain a lot that users don’t understand about OpenID logins booting them to another website to authenticate.
Don’t Google already do this with Blogger and Yahoo with Flickr? That is to say: don’t tens of millions of people do this regularly already?
I mean, what’s the big difference? I know there are other usability complaints/problems, but this one sounds eerily like a straw man to me.
I think the Blogger/Google and Flickr/Yahoo experiences are slightly different because the user experiences it as staying on one Web site (more or less in the second case - they still see a Flickr “house style” and logo on the Yahoo/Flickr login page, rather than logging in on a page with a quite different look/feel).
I think the Paypal experience is maybe closer to the OpenID one?
Having said that, I tend to agree with your point that this doesn’t seem like the major usability challenge for OpenID.
Posted by PeteJ on October 7th, 2008 at 11:30 am