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"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
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I am a co-founder of Notches, an early stage startup currently based in NYC. We are building a free, open reviews network that anyone can participate in and anyone can build on top of. You can find out more on our official blog.

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This article is more than 45 days old. Given the speed at which the technology world moves, this post is probably somewhat out of date. Please keep this in mind when reading the post. If this is a tutorial, please check whether you are using the same versions mentioned in the article.

The Pros and Cons of OpenID

The Radar team has a good post up about the pros and cons of OpenID.

So what does all that mean?

It means that there are a lot of people who have OpenID, but they don't have many places to use them and they probably aren't aware that they have one. It is a good step towards solving some key online identity problems through an open standard that isn't trying to solve every problem at once and is instead focusing on deployment and handling issues and requirements as they arise organically. We are overall bullish on OpenID, but the security and usability issues need to be addressed before there is wide-spread user uptake and the larger players become acceptors.

We've also found the sign-in and registration to be jarring and confusing to users, but that will undoubtedly improve as partners open up (and improve) affiliate programs.

As I said before, OpenID does not define the mode of authentication, only the link between the authority and requesting site. In that sense, there's no reason someone can't provide a keyfob-based authentication site for banking and healthcare sites.

Only published comments... Mar 02 2007, 05:41 AM by Tim

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James said:

In order for authorization to be supported, the folks in the OpenID community would need to have the desire of moving past the basics of identity. Likewise, the features of an identity selector (e.g. Cardspace) will need to change. IMHO it seems no one really cares to talk deeper about authorization as it may require too much work on their parts...

March 5, 2007 3:28 AM