Re: Mozilla Persona, lessons learned

On 15 February 2014 20:57, Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com> wrote:

> Of interest to this group since we were counting on Persona being one of
> the login solutions that we'd use to transmit richer customer data to
> merchants (primarily payment processor and address information):
>
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Identity/Persona_AAR
>
> Of particular interest:
>
> """
> What did we learn?
>
> Persona should be pared down to its core: a decentralized email
> verification and login API for the web. No more session management, no
> attribute exchange.
>
> Persona should be built natively into Firefox, Fennec and Firefox OS to
> make the JavaScript shim unnecessary on these platforms. The base
> functionality should be cross-browser, but the experience should be
> optimized for the native platforms.
>
> Sites should control most of the user flow and Persona should be almost
> invisible to users.
>
> Sites should be able to offer these benefits to their users with a
> native UA implementation: better UX, reduced login friction and phishing
> protection.
> """
>
> In related news, Lloyd H. has left Mozilla. With the departure of Ben
> Adida last year, I'm wondering who's taking over the project. From what
> I gather both Ben and Lloyd started the work... wonder who is going to
> finish the work and how it's going to get finished. Thoughts, Kumar?
>

IMHO, the problem with persona is that they overloaded email to do too many
things.  It's

1. A memorable identifier
2. A primary key for identity
3. A message delivery service

This design decision has advantages for usability, but disadvantages for
scalability.

It excludes essentially "The Web" and linked data based systems such as web
payments which use URLs.  Additionally they dont use URIs to name things
which is the first axiom of web architecture.  This creates a silo
monoculture where you have to evangelize your system to a large audience
(something mozilla is good at), however a more universal system like the
one described in the web payments spec has a focus on interoperability and
should be able to stitch different identity eco systems together.


>
> -- manu
>
> --
> Manu Sporny (skype: msporny, twitter: manusporny, G+: +Manu Sporny)
> Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc.
> blog: The Worlds First Web Payments Workshop
> http://www.w3.org/2013/10/payments/
>
>