17 January 2008
OpenID Is Good For The Mobile Web
Posted by Barnabas under: Uncategorized .
Today Yahoo announced that they’re enabling OpenID on 248 million accounts, which unarguably pushes this single sign-on technology into the mainstream. In my opinion, this is also a huge win for mobile web users too, and here’s why: signing into a mobile website on your mobile is very tedious and painful, and few (if any?) mobile browsers have integrated password management yet. Furthermore, even if you have the patience to tap out your e-mail address and password, some sites won’t take it or throw SSL errors or require JavaScript. For this reason, I have not been able to sign on to mobile Facebook through my Blackjack in, let’s see, ever.
Imagine a web where most sites are now compelled to offer OpenID as an alternate sign-in method (and who will be able to afford ignoring 248 million users?). Suppose that Yahoo makes their OpenID sign-in page incredibly mobile-friendly, a likely scenario. Signing in to web sites through your mobile will become a lot easier, which will in turn make the mobile web that much easier to use and relied upon.
I believe there are three web content related technologies that will help mobile browsing adoption increase dramatically if they become ubiquitous: OpenID (or a standard like it), microformats, and mobile alt links. Let’s see what happens.