Selector box for popular OpenID providers

[azurelunatic]

Title:
Selector box for popular OpenID providers

Area:
OpenID, user interface

Summary:
In the OpenID account creation process, and possibly also the OpenID login process, include suggestions of popular OpenID providers. A common form of this is a box with the icons and names of popular providers. The user picks one, it fills in the format of that site's OpenID URL, and the user fills in their username there. Then validation proceeds as normal.

Description:
If you don't know what OpenID is, it's easier to pick from a list of suggestions a provider that you have, rather than going through places you've got accounts with and trying to see whether any of them might have OpenID. It seems to be a common plugin for WordPress and wikis.

We might want to customize it by researching which other OpenID providers our existing users use themselves and have friends at, and having those added or moved into prominence -- or perhaps make sure that every place that someone can import a journal from is visible there.

Poll #4953 Selector box for popular OpenID providers

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 57

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
39 (68.4%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (3.5%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (5.3%)

(I have no opinion)
13 (22.8%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[vampwillow]

"If you don't know what OpenID is, it's easier to pick from a list of suggestions a provider"

Thing is, the preferable option for DW is that people have a DW account (make money! control better!) rather than sending people elsewhere to *create* an OpenID. If the user already has an OpenID they will already know the details. Nobody should be needing to create an OpenID in order to use DW.

Plus it is unfair on people offering non-listed OpenID

[azurelunatic]

If the user already has an OpenID they will already know the details.

I have seen too many people not knowing that their LiveJournal account is also an OpenID account that they can use on other sites to have faith that people will realize that an account they have already created is also an OpenID.

[cesy]

It would also allow people to input a non-listed OpenID, so is not unfair to them.

[matgb]

If the user already has an OpenID they will already know the details

Do you really believe that everyone with a Google, Yahoo or even LJ account knows they have an OpenID?

Because the OpenID foundation disagrees with you there, and is doing a lot of work on improving the UI to make it intuitive enough that normal people can understand it easily.

SB and I get a lot of comments from people we know have OpenIDs, but who don't login to use them. Blogspot users generally have no idea they're OpenID enabled.

I agree that no one should need to go create an off site account in order to interact here. But I do want to see a substantial improvement in OpenID UI, to make it easy for people that don't really understand it to actually use it.

And if the implementation is, for example,t he JanRain system, which I like, then it's not 'unfair', those with common IDs get to click a button, those with uncommon ones just type their ID same as now. Works well on Blogger and WP blogs that use it.

[delladea]

If DW decides to implement something like this, I really like how StackExchange designed their OpenID login page for their family of sites.

[matgb]

That looks to me very similar to the JanRain code, which I've used a few times and like. I would hope that their setup would be usable by us, therefore we wouldn't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel.

[faithofone]

Only issue I see with that example is that it's entirely javascript reliant and does not degrade well. I had no clue what that page was supposed to show until I went and enabled javascript for that page, and all of a sudden there were pretty pictures.

[matgb]

My with changes:

If possible, have a few defaults picked, but let individual journal owners pick what should display on the comments area to click for thier journal.

I, for example, would want to ensure that Blogger and the Lib Dem login are available, but most might not want either prominent.

I think that should be possible without the JanRain codebase.

[azurelunatic]

Ooo, nifty!

I was thinking that, sitewide, one interesting thing might be to swap out what providers are listed most prominently based on number of comments from different providers, but that would also be a headache for people who depend on things being in the same place predictably.

[matgb]

Yes, but it'd be a minor, probably once off, change for a small minority of off site users who're coming from a site we get fewer logins from.

So yes, that'd be good, rotating the defaults to be the top logins would help people.

[azurelunatic]

It would also be a change for the sites who have changed places in the top logins, potentially, if it's, say, n+10 sorted by popularity with the top n at the top and then the rest of the +10 alphabetical by source.

[feathertail]

I still like the idea of just typing in the URL to your "website", like with the "named anonymous" commenting thing that we were discussing earlier. In this case, though, it'd catch on a site that doesn't have OpenID authentication.

I don't like the idea of privileging one site over another, but Blogger's OpenID system is probably the nicest one I've seen so far.