So there has been a lot of talk lately around OpenID, the user experience, how we make it better, Facebook Connect, Oauth, and the future of Identity on the “social web”.  Yahoo and Google both recently released usability data.  The results didn’t pull any punches and exposed some serious user experience problems with the way OpenID is implemented today.  Current implementations suck! They are much worse than username/password. I have to type in a URL, I get redirected, I get a trust screen, I get to type some squiggly letters.  Just let me in dammit! There is ZERO chance my mom will ever use this.

Let’s step out of the weeds for a minute.  Everyone is currently trying to solve these problems from the standpoint of every individual site’s different implementation, of which no one seems to agree on a standard.  We’ve got buttons, IDselectors, URL as Identifiers, email addresses as Identifiers, Google is proposing to do it one way, Yahoo another, etc…  Each with different trade-offs, but the end results are basically the same.  Mom doesn’t get it!  For everyday users to really understand online Identity, we need to solve the problem from the browser level.  We need to let the browser act on behalf of the Identity Providers.  One quick advantage is that it only requires a handful of project owners to agree on a standardized user experience, rather than every site on the entire Web.  Not only that, but discover-ability and education of OpenID can be standardized in the same handful of places.

The solution is Identity in the Browser (IDIB).

IDIB delivers the 3 main things that must be present for my mom to understand Identity on the Internet.

• Standardized experience with your Identity provider
• Standardized experience with your Relying party
• Standardized discover-ability

This is what it’s gonna take for Identity on the Internet to make sense.  Right, mom?