After my recent griping about sxore and the recent lack of development, I’m delighted to see that things are on the move again. They have just upgraded the logon capabilites. In addition to the standard sxore/sxip, you can now login using OpenID and i-name.

As an existing sxore user, I can continue to login using sxore.com as my homesite. But once I enable the extra identifiers on my sxore account, I can also logon using any of the current implementations of OpenID including Verisign PIP, claimID and MyOpenID. So one less logon to remember, hurrah.

The biggest problem people that has been reported to me by those who want to comment on sxore-enabled blogs like this one is that they find the whole sxore sign-up process overkill. If sxore had got more traction then it would have been a simple one-off pain and then you would could then re-use those credentials on other sites. However, at the moment it just appears to users as another one-off registration system which dissuades them from commenting.

It looks like registering with sxore as a commenter using your OpenID credentials has not been enabled. You have to sign up as usual and then add OpenID as one of your identifiers afterwards. If they made use of a person’s OpenID profile during sxore registration then it could save on a bunch of typing. I’m sure this is a planned feature.

I do think the entire Identity 2.0 community really need to sit down and think about usability from an average user perspective. In sxore’s case, the whole homesite/sxip-in concept is still confusing and in OpenID’s case, expecting users to remember URLs like joeblogs.pip.verisignlabs.com as their username is just not going to fly.

Of all the features provided by sxore, by far the most important from our perspective is a reputation system. No new Web Application that is concerned with blogging and blog content can succeed without one.

Hopefully, the new features mean that we will see a constant stream of upgrades and fixes to sxore, user uptake will increase and it will get the success it deserves.

[tags]sxore, sxip, OpenID, PIP, MyOpenID, Dick Hardt, Identity 2.0[/tags]