Our collegues at PayPal are hosting the OpenID Retail Summit tomorrow from noo to 5:00pm. It sounds like it will be an interesting exchange of ideas between identity providers and retailer (as relying parties). I will be presenting our experiences (and wishes) as large relying party tomorrow @ 3:00pm.
I will post the presentation and a short post tomorrow.
Monday, March 7, 2011
CardSpace II : "Change of Authentication Behavior"
After I wrote a short post on announcement of end of life for CardSpace, Kim Cameron (a great visionary in the field of digital identity and someone I learned a LOT from but never had the opportunity to meet) reflected on it here.
A few people (independently) emailed me and asked me whether Kim is implying that Card Space lack of adoption, at least partially, was “eBay’s fault”.
I read his post, partially quoted below, a few times and although to me it more sounds like a reflection, but I see how one may think that way. So, I decided to add a bit more details to my original post on “change of behavior”.
“In the history of computing there have actually been plenty of cases where users DID change their behavior - even though at first only a few people could understand or use the new alternatives. But those “early adopters” were able to try the new inventions on their own. They didn’t need anyone else to approve something or decide they would like it first. Once convinced, they could show the new ideas to others.
When Visicalc appeared, I don’t know how many people in IT would have bet that every accountant in the world would soon be throwing out his pencils and starting to use spreadsheets for things no one can even now believe are possible! The same is true for a thousand other applications people came to love.
But because authentication doesn’t stand on its own, users never got the chance to start using Information Cards “just because they felt like it”. They needed web sites to make the same bet they did by implementing Information Card support as an option.
Web sites didn’t want to bet. They wanted to keep to “the matter at hand” and prevent their users from getting lost or distracted. The result: a preemptive chill settled over the technology, and we never really got to see what users would make of it.
My conclusion: regardless of what new features they support, user centric identity solutions need to be built so they work with as many existing web sites as possible. They can’t require buy-in from the all the big web sites in order to be useful.”
I agree that users, and people in general, do change their behavior, and sometimes relatively quickly – if there is a direct and tangible benefit for them to do so.
In case of CardSpace, our end users simply did not perceive the benefits, besides they had to download a large binary and deal with unfamiliar experience. Ashih Jain's post capture the sentiment around the time we were experimenting with CardSpace – 2008 - (One seller kept asking me why I was asking him to “do all this just to login” ).
eBay is in the commerce business, we do take reasonable risks in changing people’s behavior around commerce related activities such as listing, classification, payment, feedback, finding, shipping, trust etc. but for login and authentication we rely largely on users' already learned behavior (or as Andrew Nash refers to it the established “steady state” of authentication).
Perhaps one way to get a large number of users familiar with Card Space, and generate consumer demand for it, was full adoption within MSFT (including Windows login panel). Microsoft owns one of the largest (if not the largest) user-facing authentication experiences in the world, if they had fully supported Card Space everywhere a login panel appears today, maybe adoption story for Card Space would have been different. That would have made it much easier for company like eBay to adopt it as well.
