unfortunately, my misgivings about low chances of OpenID Consumer (Relying Party) support on WP.COM I have expressed in my previous post (which I wrote before an official announcement has been published) are becoming true.
sadly enough, but the following comment of Matt just confirmed my speculation:
What problems we’re having do you think accepting OpenIDs would solve?
although this is a purely rhetoric question not requiring an answer, it’s clear that accepting OpenIDs would gain a greater number of Identified by an external OpenID (i.e. not Anonymous) comments to posts published by WP.COM users, thus providing them with more feedback to their blogs.
and I think they need it (as everyone who’s doing something not only for oneself) ‘to alleviate some of the pain’: if they deprived from a monetary feedback in the form of revenues from GOOG ads (they are so longing for), just why don’t give it to them by way of a simple human response, at the very least?
it’s obvious ‘the idea of creating yet another account on yet another site’ certainly ‘leave cold’ everyone (from a growing number of sites) who already has existing external OpenID accounts just to sign in to a WordPress.com blog.
also, it would decrease some load on Akismet, I believe, albeit decreasing its value to some extent for all WordPress software in general as well.
well, we know as well as Blogger is a “leading web-based tool that helps you publish to the web instantly‘, WP is a ‘state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform‘, both focusing on easiness of use to comply with simplicity of their consumer audience; that probably means such services are not supposed to have an emphasis on user interaction across different web publishing providers as well.
UPDATE:
despite a quote of the Matt’s comment already had a reference to the original blog post where it has been made (what, by the way, had been proved by the following pingback message), in view of “The Undevelopment Blog” remark on “where this quote came from” I had to modify this post a little bit to make the source more explicit.
JAWW (beta) 
I wasn’t suggesting we wouldn’t become a consumer at all, I just wanted to hear more of Andrew’s thoughts on the subject.
I don’t think lack of OpenID is causing anyone to get fewer comments than they currently should, or increase the spam on anyone’s blog. (OpenID is not an answer to spam.)
hello Matt,
thanks for taking your time leaving this comment clarifying things a bit. I’m really glad if an implication derived from your comment has actually turned to be just a wrong hasty remark of mine (for I’m really sorry) indeed.
regarding a comments from people with an external OpenID: just think about only near two million (1 844 553) of ‘active in some way’ LJ users currently cold enough about ‘the idea of creating yet another account on yet another site’.
admittedly, OpenID is not an ultimate spam silver bullet at all, nevertheless I beleive it could be quite an effective remedy that would make a spammers’ life harder and worpress users’ expereience even more happier.
look: had a wp.com accept OpenIDs it could be possible to have a ‘Discussion’ option like ‘Accept comments from Identified (wp.com registered users + OpenID) users only’. that’s pretty much like a current LJ model (Anon. comments go through ‘captcha’) which makes its users spam unaware as far as I know.
(btw, it seems to be like a ‘Membership: Users must be registered and logged in to comment’ option is a bit misplaced being on a ‘General’ options tab — I had a hard time to find it out there instead of ‘Discussion’.)
with best regards.
Why do you think that OpenID in our comment forms would make more LJ users comment? Do you think many of them understand OpenID? The 70+ million AIM users with OpenIDs?
I think the barrier to commenting is about as low as it can be already, and judging from all the stats we have here and from Akismet it’s growing about as fast as it could already.
admittedly, I do not have an exact stats on how many LJ users who actively use an OpenID (could be asked though if they have such), I can see its usage on a quite a few of the LJ clones — and that’s a big deal *both* for a journal owner and a commenter as well that comments are not anonimous, have an identified by an URL author (that’s basically the OI is for as I can understand it).
generally speaking, an amount of users who understand (and use) OI is in the linear correlation from a number of OI RP (Consumer) enabled services: the more services accepting it, the more users who use it (and hence understand). so it’s a matter of time needed for OI adoption.
yes, it’s true the barrier to (anonimous) commenting currently is very low indeed (about 5,000 spam comments only on this blog and I should confess *none* of which I didn’t check [and never will] whether it’s a real spam or not, what actually means there may be quite legitimate comments lost in the Akismet queue just as well as a recent comment of mine on Adam‘s blog [I posted it being logged off and it has about 4 hyperlinks]), resulting S/N ratio low too.
hmm, i’d rescue your comment, but i’m having the ‘0 spam in queue’ bug. i gave up checking all the spam on that blog a while back, figuring most people would email me, and the blog itself isn’t terribly important.
i’m not sure openid would make livejournal users more likely to comment either. my main want of openID consuming is to make ‘registered comments only’ a viable option.
nonetheless, i’d prefer to see the openID server here satbilitzed before we get to the consuming part (i signed up with iconbuffet purely because i could, only to then be unable to login as sbk.wp.com for a couple days).
I can see Matt still isn’t completely serious about fostering adoption… :P
No offense, but LiveJournal has tried hard to push the ability for users to use their OpenIDs. And all the people that have signed up at vIdentity, at MyOpenID, at claimID, at getOpenID, understand how OpenID works with their AIM name/LiveJournal account, are getting left in the dust while WP.c isn’t a consumer.
any updates on this?
I would like to see a continuation of the topic
so would I, but I feel like Automattic is betting more on the centralised, closed-source Gravatars as an Identity system.
I just found this thread. As discussed above I find that particularly for relatively new users the idea of having to create multiple identities is problematic. Most of the people that I work with have Yahoo id’s and if I understand this Yahoo is pretty much operating the same as wp.com i.e. they are willing to be the initiator of OpenID info to other accounts but they are not willing to accept incoming accounts.
While I don’t agree with this, I think I understand why both wp.com and yahoo are following this unfortunate policy. Perhaps I mistakenly think that wordpress is enough of forward looking company that they might be more willing to entertain this then yahoo would.
As to need, in a perfect world I would like to close my blogs to specific people with an openID identifier. Again, pretty much all of my users already have a yahoo id so why should they have to request a second account? Just to be clear, ideally I would also be able to limit access to specific openID names. Given that my understanding is that these names can be pretty long I guess I am also wondering practically how this could work?
I guess I am wondering now but it is just a real shame that given both companies support OpenID that there is no way for me to allow my users to have a single login.
Peter