I've been wondering lately about using
OpenID as the only registration method for a site I'm helping out with. My problem is that I clearly see both the benefits and the problems of using OpenID.
But one problem I hadn't see hit me the other day. What about 2 users using the same nick? Even
Zarate is difficult to pick up in sites with a little bit of traffic, so what about "John Smith", "Rachel" or "Wadus"? Most likely 2 or even more users are going to have them. And because they will be registering with an OpenID provider, there's nothing you could do to prevent the collision.
Now let's say you want to do something meaningful with the nicks. What if you want to offer nice URLs based on the nick only? Now you are screwed. If you control all the registration process, you can easily prevent duplicates and the
hot nicks like
suPerFUcker77 are given away on a strictly first-come-first-served basis.
To bypass that you could do various things. For example StackOverflow adds their internal user ID to the URLs (see me
here) which is an acceptable solution.
But this problem is also a usability problem. People are going to find several users with the same nick and they are
not used to it. Let's say a forum implements OpenID and they get me hanging out and posting. You get a bunch of posts by "Zarate" with my nice
Gravatar by its side. Now, 6 months later another Zarate comes in. As opposed to the first one, new Zarate turns out to be a clever guy and on top of that he has another avatar. User will be confused: "
What? This Zarate now is clever? And what's up with the new avatar?" Eventually they'll figure out what's going on, but sure there's going to be some confusion.
And that's because
on the internet we are not used to duplicated nicks. In real life it's perfectly normal having 2 people in the same group with the same name because they have different faces, different voices and you just can
see they are different. But there's only one Zarate in
unvlog, there's only one Zarate in
Planetaki, etc.
Maybe this is something that is inevitable in the long term as more and more people have an internet life, but today I think is a little bit of a problem that adds up to the OpenID list. If you are interested here you have a bunch of links about OpenID, help yourself.
*
Using OpenID how do you handle 2 accounts with the same nick*
OpenID for non-SuperUsers*
Security risks associated with me using OpenId as the authentication method on my site*
OpenID Is Why I Hate The Internet*
How to address OpenID providers downtime?