Tim Bray Now Working on Identity at Google

Tim Bray:

I’ve be­come fas­ci­nated by the tech and pol­icy and de­vel­oper is­sues around OAuth, and two things seem ob­vi­ous to me:

  • User­names and pass­words gen­er­ally suck and ob­vi­ously don’t scale to the In­ter­net, so we need to do away with ’em soon­est.

  • The new tech­nol­ogy com­ing down the pipe, OAuth 2 and friends, is way too hard for de­vel­op­ers; there need to be bet­ter tools and ser­vices if we’re going to make this whole In­ter­net thing smoother and safer.

No doubt in my mind that this is one of the big problems to be solved for the industry over the next decade, and Bray’s two-point bullet list is exactly right: the username/password solution is bad for users in numerous ways, but whatever eventually replaces it needs to be easy for developers.

★ Friday, 29 June 2012