- From: Henry Story <henry.story@bblfish.net>
- Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2012 12:23:00 +0100
- To: Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>
- Cc: public-webid <public-webid@w3.org>
On 9 Feb 2012, at 11:57, Melvin Carvalho wrote: > Had a chat with Henry lately and we were wondering about what steps > would help gain wider adoption. > > Of course everyone is doing their little bit, some people working on > identity providers, some working on apps, some working on the spec, > some working on integration, some on frameworks, some working on > outreach. All of this is really positive in taking the WebID > ecosystem forward. > > Some of us have been doing WebID for quite a while now, and naturally > we all have a subjective perspective on the best ways to make WebID > more popular > > But maybe we are at the point where we can, as a group, brainstorm > possible concrete strategies for how WebID can gain wider adoption. > > Does any one strategy stand out? It may be worth going over everything we have now, pros and cons of each site, and see what is missing. For example to be really basic: I don't think we have a WebId creation site that is really good and that works with all browsers. fcns.eu which I think came closest to doing a good UI job, does not work on Internet Explorer I think for example. But I may have missed something new since then. It is difficult to do any type of evangelism if the people we convince show something to their managers or investors and it does not work. Or if the UI we show people is so complicated it needs a degree in nerdiness to want to replicate once. So when we tell people to try out webid we need to show them the best we have. That requires self criticism. The demos have improved a lot over time for sure. But they will still only convince the people we speak to and not their friends, if when 50% of the people who try it out have it fail. A site that gives you a WebId should of course also be useful in some way, so that one wants to use it more than just for a demo. Even better it has to have a feature that makes people who use it want and succeed in getting their friends to easily get a webid too. Then there is the question of either building a site that can create users or get sites that have users to implement it well. Melvin has been talking to a lot of such sites over the years, such as Identi.ca, but oddly we never see any implementations from those people. The problem is they never seem to give a good reason for why they don't want to put some energy into it. Or the reasons they give, we know the be wrong. So it could be again that our demos above are just not convincing enough. WebID has to be extremely simple to use, that has to be its selling point. Henry > Social Web Architect http://bblfish.net/
Received on Thursday, 9 February 2012 11:23:31 UTC