Monday, January 21, 2008

How ironic

As pointed out by George, sites are subverting one of the main values of OpenID by hard-coding in IDP selection.

Basically, these main stream RP sites are using the "User picks their IdP" solution for determining where to send the user rather than having the user type in their IdP (yahoo.com, openid.aol.com, etc) or full OpenID URL. At the moment, this scales OK as there aren't that many mainstream providers, but either user education needs to get better so this mechanism isn't needed, or we need a different technical solution.

Of course, even when there might be enough large OPs to make the 'Pick from List' model impractical, the dirty little reality of 'Preferred Partners' should serve to filter the list down.

Either way, it's clear that OPs will not all be treated equally with respect to their selection.

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