with hope, the ‘distraction’ helps the openid community focus to win. credential mgmt’s been far too crappy for far too long. as we want access to more apps in the cloud, we need a better way to do it than we’ve got. openid is better. so is ldap. so are other federations and consortia.

standardization’s required, but waiting for it’s not the way – pushing toward it is.

a good if temporary solution is better than sitting still waiting, IMO.

to your point, though, fragmentation doesn’t help much. let’s hope for more push and less fragmentation.

S

The problem I see with OpenID is that everyone supports it but they all want to be “issuers”. Google wants to handle all the OpenID, so does Yahoo and so does everyone. I don’t see ClickPass being able to convince them that they should be the one – I bet there are going to be several OpenIDs – and we’ll be back to the same thing.

> One problem that Clickpass will soon face is that it is really a temporary solution to a problem most of these companies are already working on. We can expect Google, Yahoo, and the rest of the lot to implement their own version of OpenID, which will effectively take Clickpass out of the equation.

I’d argue that this roundabout approach is obfuscating the process. OpenID is already hard enough to grok on the user’s end. I just connected my Google account to my Clickpass and merged my Hacker News account as well. Not only did it not work (bugs are fine..) but the flow was strikingly different than the standard OpenID identification flow — which has had a fair amount of community input throughout it’s two 2.0 specification.

It seems that rocking the OpenID boat at a time when it’s mass adoption is just inches away is not helping but distracting. Just my opinion. I’ll try again when the bugs have been worked out. Nice design either way.