Vidoop and MySpace Bring OpenID to Flock
While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.
While the extension is still in alpha, it worked perfectly fine in our tests.
Usability
One of the main problems with OpenID, a technology that allows you to use the same set of credentials to sign into any service that supports this standard, is that it is often confusing to mainstream users. A number of large vendors that support OpenID, including Yahoo, MySpace, and Microsoft, have started to develop best practices for using OpenID, but to us, this extension for Flock might just represent one of the best solutions we have seen so far.
The extension is based on Vidoop's work on 'Identity in the Browser,' which has also resulted in an interesting OpenID solution for Firefox.
Flock, of course, does not have a very large user base, but other extension and browser developers will hopefully use this as an inspiration to create similar features for other browsers in the near future.
IDIB OpenID for Flock from phatbuddhaz on Vimeo.
Comments
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Anything that makes OpenID more usable for Joe Public is very welcome. Flock doesn't have great adoption though -- and ironically appeals to the nerdier prolific social networkers who WOULD probably understand OpenID -- so how about Google using the same principles to support OpenID in Chrome? That's more likely to force the hand of Microsoft to do the same in IE.
Ian Hendry
CEO, WeCanDo.BIZ
http://www.wecando.biz
We may not have the largest browser share, but Flock community members perform more than 250 million social actions per month. We're the only browser out there designed for people that visit a lot of different sites and belong to multiple social networks. We have more than 30 million logins across Flock's integrated web services. That's why Flock is a great fit for the OpenID initiative. Flock is the only browser really innovating in the space, which is why MySpace has chosen to partner with us. The extension is open source, and we certainly hope that our work here will pave the way for others to support OpenID in the same, more user-friendly way.
Evan Hamilton
Flock Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com
I tried it; and it didn't work for me. It would not recognize my Blogger-issued OpenID, period. Of course, that could be a problem on Blogger's end. I have also been unable to login to RWW with my OpenID. Some services accept it (Disqus.com for example) and some don't. So I'm not sure if the extension is bad or not. I will check back when the extension is updated.