While OpenID is one of the more interesting online identity concepts, usability issues have clearly hampered its mainstream adoption. Flock, MySpace, and OpenID provider Vidoop have now come together to develop a browser extension for Flock that makes using OpenID a lot easier for Flock users. Besides managing your OpenID credentials, the extension also detects when a site supports OpenID and lets you sign in with the click of a button.
While the extension is still in alpha, it worked perfectly fine in our tests.
Usability
One of the main problems with OpenID, a technology that allows you to use the same set of credentials to sign into any service that supports this standard, is that it is often confusing to mainstream users. A number of large vendors that support OpenID, including Yahoo, MySpace, and Microsoft, have started to develop best practices for using OpenID, but to us, this extension for Flock might just represent one of the best solutions we have seen so far.
The extension is based on Vidoop’s work on ‘Identity in the Browser,’ which has also resulted in an interesting OpenID solution for Firefox.
Flock, of course, does not have a very large user base, but other extension and browser developers will hopefully use this as an inspiration to create similar features for other browsers in the near future.
IDIB OpenID for Flock from phatbuddhaz on Vimeo.
