OpenID: Great idea, bewildering consumer experience
A while back I tried signing up for an OpenID, an "open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity." The basic idea is that, instead of needing to choose a user name and password for every site you visit …
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2007 WordPress.com turned on OpenID, introducing the standard as a way to stop juggling a username and password for every site. The protocol side looked healthy — an open, decentralized framework that any provider could issue identities under.
This piece is the consumer-side reality check: the analyst praises the user-centric identity concept but found the actual signup bewildering. That gap between an elegant spec and a usable product is exactly what will decide whether the standard spreads beyond the developers who already understand URLs-as-identity.
First-order effects
- Ordinary web users attempting OpenID signup hit a confusing experience built around technical concepts (identity as a URL) that mean nothing to them, capping adoption at the enthusiast tier.
- Relying sites that enabled OpenID logins, such as WordPress.com, get a credential system most of their visitors cannot successfully use on first attempt.
Second-order effects
- Usability, not protocol capability, becomes the bottleneck — creating an opening for wrapper services and providers whose job is to hide the URL mechanics behind familiar email-style login flows.
- Big consumer platforms face pressure to act as OpenID providers themselves, since delegated sign-in only works at scale when someone trusted handles the account creation step.
Third-order effects
- If open identity standards stay developer-legible but consumer-opaque, their fate rests with intermediary layers that abstract them away — openness surviving only through products that make it invisible.
- Identity infrastructure consolidates around whichever party controls the simplest front door, raising the question of whether a decentralized standard can avoid recreating centralized gatekeepers in practice.
The trend: Open, decentralized identity standards succeed or stall on consumer experience, with platform-run abstraction layers — not the specs themselves — deciding how far openness travels.