Marc Canter raises what many in the community have been saying for a long time, but what the OpenID Foundation seems to have a hard time wrapping its collective minds around:

… OpenID can actually solve … [many] issues - by embracing other complementary technologies (like oAuth, OpenSocial, Portable Contacts, microformats, FOAF and RSS/Atom) to create a wrapper solution oriented approach - focused on simplifying the whole ID conundrum for end-users. Barriers of entry, usability issues and confusing messages can all be solved by OpenID positioning itself as a single point-of-contact solution.

He follows up the next day saying:

Open Stack is a little too general. I use the term open mesh - on purpose - cause I don’t WANT it to be specific. Open Mesh has to represent the combination of a bunch of different stacks; some open, some semi-open, whatever.

But OpenID sure is a great term - and it could certainly be morphed into THE brand.

This is what we need right now - a single entry point into solving the ID conundrum. ID is hard and asking end-users to keep track of the difference between Single Sign-On, authenticaton, reliable parties, claims, trust, security, privacy, data portability and persona - is just not gonna happen.

…

Without that - and we’ll be stuck catering to geeks and nerds like us - forever.

That last sentence is one that I’ve been re-iterating to anybody who’d listen in OpenID land for too many months now, or so it feels. Branding is at the very top of that list, and I completely agree that the brand has to bigger than a little protocol (and thus confuse the user with some many more little brands of other little protocols).

The question is: do the movers and shakers in this community have the courage to put the petty turf wars over being the biggest fish in a tiny pond aside, merge the ponds and actually create something, together, that is big enough to truly matter?

Says Marc:

Or as Rodney King said so eloquently “why can’t we all work together?”

And I might add: and perhaps accomplish something that actually matters in the real world?