Netscape.com += OpenID; more...

Note: The folks over at Netscape are doing this on their own and I have no inside information whatsoever.  So I can blog freely.

It's great to see Netscape start accepting OpenIDs.  It's good to see the user experience issues being worked out -- the best methods will win out over time.  Dmitry Shechtman calls for the elimination of registration, though what he actually says is a bit stronger:

The usefulness of OpenID is void if your service requires all users to sign up regardless of whether they have an OpenID. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask them to provide additional details, such as an active e-mail address (although OpenID Simple Registration usually handles that for you). You can do it after the user signs in for the first time. Just don’t ask her to sign up.

I understand this point of view, but disagree:

• Users expect to find "sign up" or "register" links when going to a new site; not providing them breaks their expectations and that's bad.
• If a user doesn't have an OpenID already, they do need to register with your site.  You have to make this just as easy as before you added OpenID to your UI.
  
• Sometimes you really do need to gather an e-mail address, agree to Terms of Service legalese, etc. before using a site.
  

Whether you call this "providing additional details" or "registration" the flow is much the same.  I do agree that in the long run it would be better if you could simply let OpenID-enabled people sign in, collect whatever registration info you can automatically, and then decide if and when to bother them with registration administrivia at that point or when you actually need it.  In the short run, it's simply not feasible to optimize for OpenID experience at the expense of your other users.

Unfortunately, you don't currently know who has an OpenID and who doesn't.  Maybe there's room here for a service: gotopenid.org.  You sign in there once with your OpenID, and it cookies you as someone who wants to use OpenID wherever possible.  Sites that want to offer an OpenID-streamlined experience could make a JSON call to http://gotopenid.org/check.js.  This would tell the site that the user knows what OpenID is and prefers to use it for signing in.

On a side note, it looks to me by the screen shots that the AOL/AIM screen name integration is simply using the AOL OpenID identity service.  We'll see on Monday;  certainly that's the easy way to do it -- a convenience wrapper around an OpenID sign in.

Tags: openid, launch, openid consumer, aol