Decius wrote:

It makes netizens' lives easier in consolidating the number of identities they need to maintain.

I'm not convinced I agree with that conclusion, as things presently stand.

It is not about account generation. If that's all you care about, then of course we're at a wall. Except the advertising properties of running a OpenID authenticator.

If you talk to Bucy, what you'll hear is a lot of angst about having all of his activities and contents being on remote locations. That memestreams would be a whole lot better if the streams were, or could be, individually controlled. That the reputation system is the feature, not your fantastic web design. Having an ID with the authenticator of his choice is a step in a decentralized proceeding.

You lose lock-in. If that's the problem, it is worth noting. But one of the things that is more appealing about the memestreams community than the rough equivallents (for me) of blogline's clipping service, Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0, del.icio.us, etc etc is the hacker aesthetic of the system. The 'despite being such a small community that makes the recommendation system mostly moot' aspect is overshadowed by 'but it is the right way to do it' attitude.

Now, I could decide to allow anonymous posts if they offer this kind of authentication. The value of that would be that initially spammers will be unlikely to use this system. However, over time, spam will flow in this way...

It is not strictly anonymous, and not strictly non-anonymous. It gives you a framework for establishing posting rights without obligatory account creation. Limit your OpenID acceptance of sites that provide some minimal standard of user authentication. Whatever.

Soooo many sites require registration before using them; I don't even have a good ballpark on the number of web sites I have accounts on. And I'm fucking sick of it. I understand that one wants to establish a user-tracking identity when running a site. But I don't want to have to create a new log-in and password for every silly web forum and newspaper; either I end up using a single password (risk), or a password algorithm (hassle). The risk is that I start to actually care about one of the accounts, and the password is vulnerable by the inexperience of any of the servers I use. We could argue that point, but let's not. Yeah, not having to have a password on memestreams would be nice.

What I'm saying is, gee, wouldn't it be nice to log into sites and blogs by authenticating against MemeStreams (adding MemeStreams visibility). When I post to a big blog, the stuff I post on MemeStreams is a better representation of the content I would like to be categorized for than my personal livejournal. If I am posting in public, an interested reader does not want to drop to a personal discussion of my apartment situation. I would be as happy to be "dmv from MemeStreams" as "dmv@one of my vanity or small domains" or a gmail identity.

And for the lurkers who have not yet bought into MemeStreams, or don't want Yet Another Web Service in their lives, to not have to create an account to make a reputable comment when they find a memestreams note lying around. A person who works on OpenID who would love to chime in here with a point that both of us is wrong about, but isn't going to create an account for that privellege. I would trust an expert who logged in with an identity that points to a fully populated and trafficed blog than someone who created a memestreams account to make a comment and maybe bothered to say that their homepage was of some relevant expert.

Or is account generation so important to you that you can't imagine why someone who finds MemeStreams wouldn't make it a top destination? What is the active/unused account ratio? How many people created an account, posted one comment, and left?

But I see the potention over time, if I can rely on this location for detailed bio information about you. I was thinking a useful complement to this would be a service which validates your email address and sends you a digitally signed certificate that your email address checked out. That way you could do it once and post it on this page, and other sites could rely on that instead of having to do it themselves...

Email is at least as much bullshit of an authentication method as a URL. Send your disagreements to DeciusDisagrees@mailinator.com. Or WhatDoesDMVThink@papernapkin.net. For now, yes -- high traffic blogs will email you your comment, and you have to click a link before it posts. I am sure you and I could construct a nice crypto system with email to prove some properties about the user -- but that would only continue the ghettofication of MemeStreams.

OpenID is a reasonable way to authenticate User to URL mapping. Given the disposable nature of both URLs and Email addresses, obviously we have to embed additional logic if we want to strengthen the usefulness of what that mapping provides. As a non-admin, my ability to trust the identity of a fellow user would be strengthened by the user selecting and publicizing their authenticated URL than by knowing that there exists an email address (unaccessible) for which the poster can or at some point could read the messages at.

RE: news: OpenID support