German Handelsblatt on OpenID. Fail!

by aymlis

Last month I demanded more (positive) coverage of OpenID. Well, last week German newspaper Handelsblatt published an article on OpenID and German service Allyve, calling both “Generalschlüssel zum Internet” (master key to the internet). Great, an article on OpenID on the website of one of the most respected newspapers in the country. For those who don’t know, Handelsblatt is the biggest German financial and business newspaper with a print run of about 150,000 copies daily.

However, reading the article my joy was only short-lived. It is obvious, the author doesn’t understand OpenID at all and did not research the article well.

He writes

1. users can register an OpenID on the homepage of the OpenID Foundation, and
2. portals like Yahoo!, AOL, and Microsoft accept OpenID.

Wrong, wrong. He also claims OpenID was like a virtual passport, opening the doors of many websites. Well, maybe it’s just me, but I don’t like OpenID being associated with passports or identity cards at all. OpenID doesn’t represent a person. It is only a claim that someone controls a certain URL.

Also, OpenID is probably the opposite of what Allyve is about. Basically, Allyve works as a start page to many services on the web. Though users have to provide their usernames and passwords to it in order to make that work. Password anti-pattern in full effect! If you want to know more about Allyve, I wrote about it when it launched last year.

All in all, this article is pretty frustrating to read. And Handelsblatt doesn’t have comments. No chance to correct things. A letter to the editor? I don’t feel like doing it. Though this article shows that more efforts have to be made to market OpenID and the entire Open Stack.