OpenID provider JanRain has launched an interesting project called Demand OpenID, which lets users click a bookmarklet whenever they are on a website that they want to request OpenID support on. It’s a handy, if a touch rude, way to demonstrate user demand for OpenID on popular websites.
Right now the most popular services for users to demand OpenID are Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Facebook, Amazon and Google.
JanRain’s Brian Ellin says the project was inspired by blogger Aaron Hockley’s recent oath to no longer comment on tech blogs that fail to offer OpenID login. Way to go Aaron!
Bumps in the Road
Unfortunately the service doesn’t check to see if there’s OpenID login already available on the site you’re on – so my apologies to photo sharing site Zooomr, for example, if I made them feel at all defensive in testing.
It would also be nice if there was some way to know that the vendors were made aware of the demands. One way I can think of would be to publish a feed of each demand and ping the blogsearch engines with that feed. Then each demand would get picked up by company PR monitoring blogsearch feeds for mentions. I could set that up myself using a scraping service and FeedBurner, but that might not be so nice.
Early shortcomings aside, Demand OpenID is a great and simple idea.
Until now I’ve been twittering every time I get angry about the lack of OpenID somewhere. Now I’ll use the bookmarklet. You should too, everyone should. Demand OpenID is built on the Google App Engine, so it can take the kind of click quantities that the lack of OpenID adoption around the web warrants.
Thanks to the Vidoop blog, a great place to unearth all kinds of OpenID related news like this.
