Bringing OpenID To The Masses: Clickpass
OpenID, a way to sign on to multiple web sites with a single set of credentials, has incredible promise. Large companies have signed up. Thousands of website take OpenID sign-ins. All is good, right? — Well, not exactly.
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenID has been accumulating institutional weight without consumer traction: WordPress.com added support in March 2007, and by January 2008 Google, IBM and Verisign were said to be joining the effort. But the protocol's Achilles heel has been documented since August 2007, when analysts flagged its bewildering consumer experience — great decentralised idea, unusable signup flow.
Clickpass's launch attacks exactly that gap: rather than extending the standard itself, it wraps an easier front end around it so mainstream users can get an OpenID and use it without understanding URLs or delegations. The bet is that adoption is bottlenecked on usability, not on provider count.
First-order effects
- Mainstream users gain a one-stop way to create and manage an OpenID, removing the URL-and-delegation confusion that the 2007 critique identified as the adoption blocker.
- The thousands of sites already accepting OpenID sign-ins get more usable traffic, since visitors no longer need to understand the protocol to log in.
Second-order effects
- Existing OpenID providers are forced to compete on consumer experience rather than spec conformance — a startup wrapping the protocol can reset user expectations for everyone.
- Other identity players watching the large-company wave of early 2008 now face pressure to offer their own simplification layers before third parties intermediate their relationships with users.
Third-order effects
- If usability wrappers prove necessary for adoption, decentralised identity standards may consolidate around intermediary services that own the consumer relationship while the protocol stays open underneath.
- Single sign-on drifts from a developer-led specification toward a consumer product category, with the winning interfaces — not the standard itself — determining which credentials users carry across the web.
The trend: Web authentication is shifting from protocol-first adoption to experience-layer competition, with startups like Clickpass standing between open identity standards and mainstream users.