On Mon, 2012-12-10 at 17:29 +0100, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
> Really? Almost everyone else in the identity world disagrees!
> In
> particular, the main reason it is thought OpenID hasn't caught
> on is
> because it uses URLs instead of email addresses as
> identifiers.
>
> This is largely untrue. Fist of all, Facebook have a quite successful
> system based on HTTP identifiers and the open graph protocol.
>
Are you saying that the main reason OpenID hasn't caught on is NOT
because it uses URLs, or that almost everyone else in the identity world
does NOT disagree?
Ted, there is no consensus, identity is still wide open. There are certain groups who favour certain solutions.
There are some such as facebook,
tent.io, FOAF, indieweb whose primary focus is on http URIs. This is the style favoured by Tim Berners-Lee and others.
There are some such as OStatus, diaspora and mozilla persona who favour email style identifiers and largely wish to exclude http. This is the style favoured by west coast corporates
There are two scalability problems with keying of email. The first is that it was not designed to be dereferenced so there are various hacks being proposed at the IETF in order to address this.
The main scalability issue is that, despite claims to the contrary, no system I've ever seen in the email only interoperates well with the http identity world ie The Web, in practice. However the converse is not true. For example you can log in quite easily to facebook via email or lookup friends, or even use someone's real name.
The consensus is to use common sense. And that is principles of architecture. Tolerance is the key to interoperability, federation and scalability.