Tag Archives: OpenID

Plaxo's two click signup with Google OpenId a hit

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Plaxo’s two click signup with Google OpenId a huge hit, shows 92% success

Plaxo announces its success with the launch of its new OpenID – 2 clicks signup feature! Plaxo a trust partner of Google worked together closely to enhance user signup process…. And they did it!


As per Plaxo, the success rate of the new feature to use OpenID for signup shows 92% of success.

The goal of the Two-Click Signup initiative is simple: deliver a new user onboarding experience based on the “Open Stack” that is strictly better for all parties than traditional registration flows. And that means we want to achieve something that it is:

- better for the user by being more convenient and more secure;

- better for the identity provider by not asking the user for their password and then scraping their data; and

- better for the site by delivering a higher conversion rate on signup flows and getting more useful data from the user.

A small presentation about the analysis of Two click signup by Plaxo [By John McCrea - VP marketting, Plaxo & Joseph smarr - Chief platform architect, Plaxo].

What an "RP" Wants

As you have seen the slide, the two click signup is a HIT. This feature would grow as now facebook has also joined the OpenId foundation. Since many people now think about user experience other than any other hi funda stuff this surely is a huge success!!!

Watch a quick video

Stay tuned for more updates!

Facebook joins OpenID Foundation

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Facebook joins OpenID Foundation Board

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Facebook announced this afternoon that it’s joining the OpenID Foundation – an interesting move considering that Facebook Connect, the company’s identity platform for third-party websites, has so far looked like more of a competitor to OpenID than an ally.

In a blog post, Facebook writes “We’re happy to announce today that we are formalizing our support of the OpenID Foundation by officially joining the board. It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web.” However, the company stops short of announcing plans to either become an identity provider for OpenID, or, allowing people to use OpenID to login to Facebook.

What this move seems to be about, at least in the way that Facebook and the OpenID Foundation are spinning things, is improving the user experience of OpenID. In another blog post, Chris Messina, who is involved with the OpenID Foundation, writes, ”Although Facebook has not announced any plans for implementing OpenID specificly, their commitment to help improve the user experience suggests to me that it’s only a matter of time before all of the major social networks, in some way, support OpenID. If there were any lingering doubts about the competition between Facebook Connect and OpenID, hopefully the outcome of a success collaboration will put them to rest.”

Facebook’s financial contribution along with its membership on the board signals the company’s enthusiasm to work more closely with the OpenID community, building up momentum towards their adoption of OpenID as a standard. Facebook furthering its commitment to openness couldn’t have come at a better time to make 2009 an amazing year for OpenID and the wider social web.

Yahoo and AOL Enhancing OpenID with Data Portability via Simple Registration

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As many of my readers know, the user experience (UX) for OpenID has been a source of confusion and an impediment to broader adoption. That gave rise to an OpenID UX Summit a few weeks ago, hosted by Yahoo and attended by Google, Microsoft, MySpace, AOL, Plaxo, Facebook and many others. It also was a major focus of sessions and late-night discussion at last week’s Internet Identity Workshop. Today, we get to see some of the fruits of those efforts, as Yahoo rolls out (in a limited test) a new implementation of OpenID, currently live with just two test sites, Plaxo and Jyte; and AOL releases preview support for data portability via SREG.

Yahoo’s post describes the details:

Today, we are announcing the start of a limited test of the Simple Registration extension for the Yahoo! OpenID service. The Simple Registration extension allows OpenID RPs to request user profile data from the OpenID provider. Yahoo! will be providing Yahoo! OpenID users the ability to share the following Simple Registration fields for this initial test: Full Name, Nick Name, Email Address, Gender, Language and Timezone. The Yahoo! OpenID user will have full control on whether to share their profile data with the OpenID relying party. We will use the Yahoo! Profiles API to populate the user card which will be presented on the Yahoo! OpenID Review and Confirm page.

Joseph Smarr of Plaxo also has a post on the matter, including screenshots of the improved onboarding flow. As Joseph points out, this is really something bigger than single sign-on; the key is that the identity can bring with it, at the user’s option, some of their social data. This is an important step forward for data portability:

I think we can continue to expect more and more data to flow across the OpenID link, which will make it increasingly valuable for Relying Parties like Plaxo, and should incentivize many more sites to become RPs themselves. It’s great to see this virtuous cycle in motion, and Plaxo is eager to work with any and all OpenID Providers who want to improve their UX and empower their users to use more of their data across the web!

So, if you don’t have a Plaxo account yet, you can sign up for one with your Yahoo OpenID. If you choose to share your basic account info, you’ll land on a registration form that is pre-populated with with almost every field you need to activate your account. You only need to add your birthday and your country. (In a future release, we hope to get those last two fields as well, so we can do away with the form entirely.) Oh, and the user’s language choice will come along, too, so we can drop them into the appropriate localized version of Plaxo. Sweet!

George Fletcher of AOL also has a post on the AOL and SREG, entitled “OAuth and SREG and MapQuest! Oh My!” I’m still trying to figure out where I can go see the AOL OpenID w/ SREG live. Any pointers, anyone?

It’s great to see the pace of innovation on the Open Stack begin to accelerate.