You should probably put "Please login with your Facebook or Gmail account below" on your front page instead.
Modify the services named based on expected clients. Choose one or more from the following: AOL, BBC, Facebook, Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, LiveJournal, Yandex, Ustream and Yahoo!. *
On the sign-up page, put in smaller text "You can sign up/log in with any compatible OpenID service" for the technically savvy users, if you expect any at all.
A problem with asking someone for their gmail password to sign into malwarenet.org is that it seems very suspicious. Why does malwarenet.org want my password? I bet I can guess - they want to steal my email, find my bank account numbers and identity fraud me. Oh, it doesn't work that way, right right, but how can any one without exceptional technical skills know that for sure? Lots of site spoofing out there.
Hell, opendns is giving me a spoofed ip address for google right now. What is that about, I thought they were secure. What else on my DNS service has been hacked? Bank sites? Probably.
"Modify the services named based on expected clients. Choose one or more from the following: AOL, BBC, Facebook, Google, IBM, MySpace, Orange, PayPal, VeriSign, LiveJournal, Yandex, Ustream and Yahoo!. "
That's the problem! Most people will look at this and don't know what to do. People hate choice, you generally have to lead them. On the other hand, that you even have to provide such a big list is a flaw in the OpenID spec in my opinion.
Obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but most of the time they don't want to think, they want to use the app.
Perhaps I didn't phrase my comment clearly? I meant that the website creator can pick one or two of the above to feature on the sign-up page. Examples: Aiming at techy 20-somethings? Google's your bet. Professionals? Advertise Linkedin. Users from Russia? Yandex and Livejournal.
Advertise one or two of the most likely sign-in credentials (so people who hate choice have it easy), and then put a small note that others are accepted too (so people who know what's going on aren't locked out).
OpenID is a delegated identity service. It's like a credit card, drivers license or social security card. And on that front everyone knows how to use one. It's been companies like Facebook, Microsoft that have been fucking this up and trying to own it, and to create some bullshit "one web identity" service.
I have been trying to seek out jobs to improve the UX of OpenID, and at MySpace I did the 1st popup login flow.
After MySpace imploded, I even tried for a short time to start an identity company called redrover, but then i had an offer to build an identity service for unity ( which was never internally supported ).
I am very passionate about making web identity work, and allowing people to have multiple web persona.
I have more idea's but i don't have a platform to innovate on.
Maybe now that I am working part time at UCSF on 'Profiles' with Harvard I have a shot again to fix OpenID, OpenSocial, and OAuth.
if you think about it a bit, you could use css inflection to determine or refine a list of potential OpenIDs that the user might use to log in.
maybe we finally make browsers smarter, or even better yet maybe with any login form on a web page
<form type="login"
openidprovider="http://myspace.com/{userid}"
action="https://login.myspace.com/login">
<!-- or something that supports webfinger -->
<input name="username">
<input name="password" type="password">
<input name="openid" type="url">
</form>
then supporting sites could.... tell the browser to cache that those openid urls like you do for username password pairs.
it also might be possible to link your openid to user profile in a browser, so that when you see the openid login form the browser can know what your profile is and delegate that identity transaction for you, like it handles cookies.
