This was always my biggest complaint with OpenID. I'm glad Google did something about it. Perhaps others will follow suit.

Users are comfortable using an e-mail address as an identity. Everyone has an e-mail address. This makes sense to end-users.

E-mail addresses are unique and they accurately identify who someone is. I have no idea why this wasn't the standard in the first place.

For sure. This is a slight change, but a big change for the better. Nobody wants to remember a URL when they already remember their email. This makes perfect sense, and solves the biggest issue with OpenID in a way that looks like it puts it on par with the ease of use for end users of Facebook Connect, for example.

If every service simply required an email address, and the standard provided for a way to find out the access point from the OpenID provider, then we'd be all set and everyone would be able to implement this change.

Contact information should not be an identifier. It's like when a B&M store uses your phone number to ID you. I don't want them calling me and I don't want your website to email me.

The URL is simply a pointer to my identity, which is all I should have to give. The different formats the providers use is what makes it confusing (example.com, username.example.com, example.com/username, and now [email protected])

If Google had stuck with the standard OpenID implementation, they could've still had the same user experience. http://[email protected]/ is a valid URL, and Google could've used that as the OpenID URL.

Entering http before your email address doesn't make any sense to the average user.

Entering http doesn't make any sense to the average user.

Exactly.

The http:// is not necessarily required, he was just pointing out that it's a valid URI and thus can be used as an OpenID identifier.

It seems most OpenID implementations handle identifiers without the http:// prepended.

how hard would it be to slap "http://" onto the email if it wasnt there? that way you get your email and you dont break the standard. not hard, not hard at all.

Most/all OpenID libraries already seem to handle identifiers without the http://

If the libraries don't already support the "@" syntax, they should.

If Google's way of doing things requires any proprietary changes, I'd say it's unacceptable, but if that's the only change necessary then it seems like a reasonable way of doing things.