OpenID and the Register

The Register is one of my favourite sources of news, and one of the things they do well is to put the opposing view. Of course being contrary is fun, but of course it doesn't mean its right.

Ted Dziuba has written an article railing against OpenSocial, OpenID and Google Gears (rather humourously I admit). However, while I agree the jury is still out on OpenSocial and Google Gears, I think that Ted is deliberately having a go at OpenID for no particularly good reason.

Ok. I admit. OpenID is not the simplest thing to handle.

But then again, it took my mum a while to figure out this InterWebbyNetty thing too. The fact is that there are a whole bunch of people who don't understand really how the web works, but they somehow muddle through. These are the people who type a URL into the Google Search bar, it comes back with the same URL as the first link in the list, and they click on that link.

So Ted is basically saying these same people cannot type "pizak.myopenid.net" in as their username? Hmmm. I think my mum could handle that. And she might appreciate not having 100 different userids on a 100 different systems, that each implement a different rule on how long, and how complex the password should be. A different rule on memorable places, names, mother's maiden name, etc for when you forget the password. A different login page.

Ted claims:

"I got lost on the part where my username isn't really a username. Its a URL."

Of course this is the same Ted Dziuba who somehow manages to debug complex Java code by looking at stack traces with jstack. Hmmm.

Personally, it seems that Ted (who used to work at Google) has a thing against Google. Google likes OpenID, therefore Ted doesn't like OpenID.

Enjoy the article, just apply a large pinch of salt.