It takes a village

Andy Dale ponders the 'juju' that OpenID has, in comparison to SAML. He uses the analogy of a village to tease out differences.

My thoughts

1. OpenID is designed for 'fun' use cases. It's just more fun to talk about Twitter than an enterprise employee accessing their health records.
   
2. Inversely correlated to their 'fun' level is the value of the applications being accessed through OpenID SSO. With low value apps, OPs & RPs need not overly concern themselves with the mundane issues of business relationships, contracts, and lawyers (which would be the opposite of fun).
   
3. Because of #2, there are more visible places for users to play with OpenID. Being able to play with a technology is key. It's highly likely that you have benefited from SAML-based operations, but you were unaware of it.
   
4. OpenID has a video.
5. OpenID has a logo.

Personally, I enjoy the infrastructure services (e.g. water, sewage, electricity, cable, etc) that modern city living provides me. Actually I live in the suburbs, perhaps that's the ideal compromise?

p.s. Andy throws in an evolutionary twist to his analogy

If two teams of engineers looked out over an early version earths eco-system and one designed ‘the perfect organism’ and the other designed an ameba capable of rapid reproduction and innovation which would you bet on for long time survival?

This sounds too much like Intelligent Design.