In the past week or so, two of the biggest perception problems preventing proliferation of OpenID as the de facto standard for decentralized identity on the Web have been addressed. The first perception problem is around the issue of usability. I remember attending the Social Graph Foo Camp last year and chatting with a Yahoo! employee about why they hadn’t become an Open ID relying party (i.e. enable people to login to Yahoo! account with OpenIDs). The response was that they had concerns about the usability of OpenID causing reducing the number of successful log-ins given that it takes the user off the Yahoo! sign-in page to an often confusing and poorly designed page created by a third party.

Last year’s launch and eventually success of Facebook Connect showed developers that it is possible to build a delegated identity workflow that isn’t as intimidating and counterproductive as the experience typically associated with delegated identity systems like OpenID. On May 14th, Google announced that a similar experience has now been successfully designed and implemented for OpenID in the Google Code blog post titled Google OpenID API - taking the next steps which states

We are happy to announce today two new enhancements to our API - introducing a new popup style UI for our user facing approval page, and extending our Attribute Exchange support to include first and last name, country and preferred language. The new popup style UI, which implements the OpenID User Interface Extension Specification, is designed to streamline the federated login experience for users. Specifically, it's designed to ensure that the context of the Relying Party website is always available and visible, even in the extreme case where a confused user closes the Google approval window. JanRain, a provider of OpenID solutions, is an early adopter of the new API, and already offers it as part of their RPX product. As demonstrated by UserVoice using JanRain's RPX, the initial step on the sign-in page of the Relying Party website is identical to that of the "full page" version, and does not require any changes in the Relying Party UI. Once the user selects to sign in using his or her Google Account, the Google approval page is displayed. However, it does not replace the Relying Party's page in the main browser window. Instead it is displayed as a popup window on top of it. We have updated our Open Source project to include a complete Relying Party example, providing code for both the back-end (in Java) and front-end (javascript) components. Once the user approves the request, the popup page closes, and the user is signed in to the Relying Party website.

The aforementioned OpenID User Interface Extension allows the relying party to request that the OpenID provider authenticate the user via a “pop up” instead of through navigating to their page and then redirecting the user back to the relying party’s site. Thus claim that OpenID usability harms the login experience is now effectively addressed and I expect to see more OpenID providers and relying parties adopt this new popup style experience as part of the authentication process.

The second biggest perception blocker is the one asked in articles like Is OpenID Being Exploited By The Big Internet Companies? which points out that no large web companies actually support OpenID as a way to login to their primary services. The implication being that companies are interested in using OpenID as a way to spread their reach across the web including becoming identity providers for other companies but don’t want others to do the same to them.

That was true until earlier this week when Luke Shepard announced Facebook Supports OpenID for Automatic Login. Specifically,

Now, users can register for Facebook using their Gmail accounts. This is a quicker, more streamlined way for new users to register for the site, find their friends, and start exploring. Existing and new users can now link their Facebook accounts with their Gmail accounts or with accounts from those OpenID providers that support automatic login. Once a user links his or her account with a Gmail address or an OpenID URL, logs in to that account, then goes to Facebook, that user will already be logged in to Facebook. In tests we've run, we've noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.

This makes Facebook the first major web company to truly embrace OpenID as a way to enable users to sign up and login to the site using credentials from a third party (a competitor even). The fact that they also state that contrary to popular perception this actually improves the level of engagement of those users is also a big deal.

Given both of these events, I expect that we’ll see a number of more prominent sites adopting OpenID as they now clearly have nothing to lose and a lot to gain by doing so. This will turn out to be a great thing for users of the web and will bring us closer to the nirvana that is true interoperability across the social networking and social media sites on the web.