Demand.OpenID.net: A One Click Call to Action
OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It's a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.
Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.
JanRain's Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley's recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!
Bumps in the Road
Unfortunately the service doesn't check to see if there's OpenID login already available on the site you're on - so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.
It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.
Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.
Until now I've been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I'll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.
Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.
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Definite props to Brian Ellin for getting Demand OpenID site going and to Aaron for inspiring him to do so. Lots of good stuff ahead for OpenID and the Portland tech scene...
Thanks for the shout out for our blog, I think you got the link wrong though, people want: http://blog.vidoop.com/archives/114
Cheers,
Kevin
I've been meaning to setup OpenID for awhile now, and this is what I needed to spur me on to action. I decided to open a new account with MyOpenID and followed Sam Ruby's method for setting things up. Thanks for the info and the prodding, just what I needed.
Now to enable it on the blog....
It's worth clarifying that the demand is for OpenID login, i.e for the site to accept OpenIDs. So it is applicable to some sites that issue OpenIDs, but do not accept OpenIDs from elsewhere.
I'm glad to see that RWW accepts OpenID login for comments - even though I couldn't get it to work just now.
This is a great idea that is executed well. Hopefully it will turn up the heat for some of these services to finally integrate OpenID. While it is certainly easier to build a site with OpenID from the start, it can be added later as well without too much trouble. The biggest concern for a site like Twitter is their API breaking. All of the twitter services use a regular username and password and so they will all also need to support OpenID and so Twitter will need to move to OAuth which was built with this problem in mind.
Easier and safer authentication is a good thing.
I Twitter the most when I'm frustrated as well. It gets the stress out.
The fact that there have to be tutorials like those Sam Ruby ones out there is reason enough for most people to ignore OpenID. This kind of annoying campaign is a reason to actively root against them.
I'm no amazing technical wizard but I set up OpenID accounts without reading anything more than the OpenID website.
Logging in to OpenID-accepting sites is so easy, I'm now far more likely to view and leave a comment than on a website that requires me to dig out a username and password.
Well done to everyone at OpenID!
Posted by: heavylight.myopenid.com
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May 17, 2008 8:04 AM
This is great. Especially since you have to sign in with an OpenID to use Demand, these are qualified requests, by people who actually use OpenID, and the system is therefore less likely to be gamed (since it's easier to just blacklist abusive OpenIDs).
This project was also, according to Brian, partially inspired by my shitlist post, which I think is a wonderful and productive result -- that will demonstrate that it's not just me that wants to see OpenID consumption proliferate, but there are people everyday coming on board, beginning to see the value of adopting the protocol.
Excellent.
Posted by: factoryjoe.com
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May 17, 2008 4:42 PM
Second of many emails.....What happened to my email account????
Recently, I retired from Govt.service and I want to join your scheme
Please create the web.
eu te amo
It's just great!!! I'm with U!!!
I'm slightly frustrated that Google isn't on the whole OpenID thing (yes, you can use blogspot, but only if you're a blogspot blogger). All the same, this is a great idea. I hope that it has some impact and those on the list move onto providing OpenID.