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by StavrosK 5005 days ago
You're underestimating how familiar someone's email address is versus an OpenID URL whose significance the user doesn't know and whose use she can't grasp.
1 comments

Agreed. URLs as an identifier are completely alien to non-technical folks. Even I think the notion is odd. They just don't make any sense. Plus they are hard to type correctly. Email addresses don't have these problems.
Although I think you're right, I can't understand why they didn't try to "fix" OpenID and started a new thing instead.

http://xkcd.com/927/

That said, I'd love they succeed and we have finally something that works well and it's not under company-X's control.

One of the reasons why we couldn't just "fix" OpenID is that we wanted a scheme that would be privacy-sensitive.

With OpenID, the result of the site redirecting you to the IdP (and then the IdP redirecting you back to the site) is that the IdP can get a trail of every website you're trying to log into. That's pretty fundamental to the way OpenID is designed.