{"id":389,"date":"2008-07-27T20:58:23","date_gmt":"2008-07-28T04:58:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/netmesh.info\/jernst\/uncategorized\/openid-celebration-and-naysayers-week"},"modified":"2008-07-27T20:58:23","modified_gmt":"2008-07-28T04:58:23","slug":"openid-celebration-and-naysayers-week","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2008\/07\/openid-celebration-and-naysayers-week\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenID Celebration and Naysayers&#8217; Week"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you read some blog posts this past week &mdash; in which MySpace adopted OpenID, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techcrunch.com\/2008\/07\/21\/myspace-to-join-openid-bringing-total-enabled-accounts-to-over-a-half-billion\/\">&quot;bringing the total number of enabled accounts to half a billion&quot;<\/a> (Techcrunch), <a href=\"http:\/\/id.orange.fr\/auth_user\/bin\/auth_user.cgi?origine=wg\">Orange&#8217;s portal in France<\/a> became one of the largest acceptors of OpenIDs ever, and Facebook fully validated the OpenID proposition &mdash; one could get the impression that all of this is nothing but bad news for OpenID and it is about to die.<\/p>\n<p>Say what?<\/p>\n<p>Here are some example posts:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Commenting on MySpace&#8217;s adoption, Nishant Kaushik (Oracle) writes: <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.oracle.com\/talkingidentity\/2008\/07\/openids_problems_dont_seem_to.html\">OpenID&#8217;s problems don&#8217;t seem to end<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Jeff Bohren (ex-BMC) writes: <a href=\"http:\/\/idlogger.wordpress.com\/2008\/07\/21\/myspace-goes-for-openid\/\">You can&#8217;t build a highway with nothing but on ramps<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>And most bewilderingly, Dick Hardt (Sxip), who is (was?) known as one of the main cheerleaders for internet identity and OpenID, writes: <a href=\"http:\/\/identity20.com\/?p=151\">Facebook Connect &#8211; fatal blow for OpenID?<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I don&#8217;t even know where to start. But perhaps it&#8217;s very simple: Any technology that had its top-three adoptions ever in the past 6 months (Yahoo and Myspace as providers, Orange as acceptor), two of which happened last week, is doing very well, thank you.<\/p>\n<p>How could anybody possibly think otherwise?<\/p>\n<p>Having said that, I think it&#8217;s not a bad idea to respond to the various points that are being made as I understand them. To make this easier, I&#8217;ll paraphrase and summarize:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><u>Argument 1:<\/u> <i>&quot;OpenID will never come to anything, as half a billion of available identities means nothing if there aren&#8217;t similarly many places where one can use those identities.&quot;<\/i> This is known as the relying party adoption problem, compounded by extrapolating past trends linearly &mdash; which is of course not the way markets work. <i><a href=\"\/jernst\/Digital_Identity\/openid-rp-adoption-problem.html\">My response.<\/a><\/i><\/li>\n<li><u>Argument 2:<\/u> <i>&quot;Unless I can have one single identity that works for the entire web, OpenID has no value proposition and nobody will ever use it.&quot;<\/i> I call it the OpenID-all-or-nothing argument.<\/li>\n<li><u>Argument 3:<\/u> <i>&quot;If OpenID does not break down walled gardens, and so far it has not, it&#8217;s useless.&quot;<\/i> I call it the OpenID-matters-only-as-a-political-tool fallacy.<\/li>\n<li><u>Argument 4:<\/u> <i>&quot;Facebook is going to win the internet identity war with a proprietary approach, there is nothing anybody will or can do about it, and OpenID (and by implication, all other identity technologies) are going to be irrelevant.&quot;<\/i> One could call this the Passport 2.0 argument.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of those, I consider last one to be the by far most interesting argument, because it deals with the heart of why OpenID matters to businesses &mdash; which at the end of the day determine the success or failure of most technologies of this kind.<\/p>\n<p>But all of these arguments deserve a response, and I will respond to them over the next few days. Stay tuned, there is only that much I can write in a day&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you read some blog posts this past week &mdash; in which MySpace adopted OpenID, &quot;bringing the total number of enabled accounts to half a billion&quot; (Techcrunch), Orange&#8217;s portal in France became one of the largest acceptors of OpenIDs ever, and Facebook fully validated the OpenID proposition &mdash; one could get the impression that all&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comments","kind-"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}