Why openID is too hard yet
Originally uploaded by bigmick.
Mick's right - OpenID in its current form should really be called Where Are You Taking Me and Why?
Mick's not the only savvy semi-tech user confused by OpenID's jargon - I don't get it either. I've created an OpenID login, and have had to abandon it in despair. I know it's out there, but it's not yet speaking a language I understand.
Reminds me of the old joke; I asked the Irishman directions to a certain place, and he said, "Well, if I was going to there, I wouldn't be starting from here."
This lovely cut-away diagram on a bus stop in York Street, Sydney, must have cost a pretty penny to produce. With its extensive index of bus routes below, it shows you which bus stop to queue at to catch a bus to your chosen destination.
Shame, then, that the diagram portrays the street from the perspective of someone standing on the other side of the road. Most people have difficulty transposing between their actual position and their indicated position on a map or diagram, and you can hardly pick up and rotate the bus station, as many of us would a street directory, to reorient it according to the direction we face.
Duncan Riley is copping some criticism on Techcrunch over his opinion that OS X Leopard's widgets are newsworthy enough to report on.
I think it's an interesting feature of Leopard, but not really significant to the widget sector (is it a sector yet? ;-) covered by TC.
Unlike most other widget platforms, OS X's widgets are hidden in a Widget app that you need to open first, reducing the number of views/user. They aren't cross-platform, and Leopard's market share is only a slice of the total OS X installed base. I don't know what share of the total OS market OS X enjoys, but it must be small. Growing faster than other OSes, likely, but from a very low base.
Microsoft, with it stated aim of being the Internet OS - and its long-developed habit of copying Apple's interfaces - may eventually copy this 'create your own widget from the browser' feature, but at MSFT's current rate of innovation, count on seeing that some time >2020, by which time it'll be Mozilla-based browsers, not IE, that will have dominant market share.
The other thing to consider is what percentage of users will make their own widget given the opportunity to do so. My experience working on personalisable homepages for portals suggests that while everyone ticks "yes" when you ask them whether they want their own personalisable homepage, when the product goes live, most of those yes-tickers will never take the time to personalise their homepage. My observations suggest that ease-of-use has no bearing on that result - it doesn't matter if it's one button on the toolbar away.
Personalisation is like fast-food - knowing that the fast-food franchise lets you choose your own fillings gets you in the door rather than the competitor's door. But 98% of us choose the off-the-shelf burger after we walk in and view the menu because it's quicker, easier, and we figure whoever decided that pickles and ketchup go together must know what they're doing. Mistakenly...
We think we want choice, but what we really want is the feeling that we could choose if we wanted to.
We have one home phone line, provided by Telstra. In the last three months we made only 87 calls, of which 55 were local. Our quarterly bill is for $103.62, which for 87 calls is an average of $1.19 per call.
We don't even have any added services on the line other than caller ID.
Really, is it any wonder Telstra customers feel perpetually ripped-off?
