The state of identity

Nov 07, 2010 18:53

In the beginning, there was OpenID, and you could identify yourself by a URL you owned. And it was good.

Well, it was okay. It would let you log into something without giving them a username and password, but that was about all.

What if you have multiple OpenIDs that you want to use together, or have your own server but don't want to set up OpenID support? Well okay you can support Yadis and serve an XRDS file listing your OpenIDs. Except they're also Yadis IDs, which are a superset or something.

What if you hate URLs? Well, er, okay, someone came along with XRI and i-names, which look like =eevee and are equally valid for all of the above as URLs.

Also the OpenID response can contain pretty arbitrary metadata about you called sreg, which isn't populated by anyone important and can't really be relied on anyway.

Also now there's Webfinger which would be awesome except barely anyone supports it, barely anyone talks about it, and even when they support it it doesn't seem to work. (See: Yahoo!)

Oh, and to top it all off, nobody really advertises what they support, so it's up to everyone who wants to support OpenID for login to list all the common ones. Cool!

I can't imagine why Facebook Connect is taking off.

What the fuck, man? It's been like five and a half years; how hard is this to work out? Every month there's a new X-something that tacks more crap onto this pretty simple idea. Half of such attempts fizzle out quietly, and half of them aren't documented whether they survive or not. I'm interested in this crap and I still can't make heads or tails of most of it.

And now there's Diaspora which has invented OStatus and some other things, based in turn on RSS/Atom and PubSubHubBub, and oh good lord.

No wonder users don't understand this or why it's useful to them.

I really hope this can stabilize soon and actually get somewhere. We need distributed identity, we need to carry identity with us, and we need to be able to share things across site boundaries. So far the solution has been for every giant to try to be everything to everyone, because sharing is still hard. This is dumb and has to stop.

And for the love of god it needs to happen before I stab someone over the Facebook "Like!" buttons.

identity, geeky

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