What I find Ironic is, the unified auth scheme was one of a few microsoft ideas that was, in many ways, before its time: MSN Passport, which long-preceded open-standards, was just the sort of thing that should have propelled them into the social space.  What happened, and, perhaps, what should we take from their failure?

I got to interview Daniel Ha, founder of Disqus last year (thanks to your introduction, Brad): http://startupsuccesspodcast.com/2011/06/show-113-daniel-ha-cofounder-and-ceo-of-disqus/. The most interesting part of the conversation for me came toward the end (16:50 to be precise), when I asked Daniel what percentage of his users chose to create a new Disqus account compared to using twitter, facebook, etc. 

He said that nearly 70% of users chose to create a Disqus account. That really surprised me … it also made me wonder if adding other authentication methods amounted to solving a problem that doesn’t really exist (at least for most startups).

Personally, I love logging in with an existing account, but why do you think 70% of Disqus users (as of last year) don’t? Do you have numbers about this from other startups you work with to know if Disqus’s experience is typical? Do you think it’s still just leading edge technology, or do you think it will be this way for the foreseeable future?

Personally, I wonder if non-technical people are intuitively hesitant about attaching something with private information of theirs (Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, Live more than Twitter) to some random site they may not trust yet. At one point, I was thinking of creating a business around this idea – having an openid provider that was branded well enough to become known, trusted, and used but that explicitly existed to control the release of personal information. I played with a few permutations (course-grained geographical information seems valuable), but ultimately, I wasn’t confident I could monetize it, and it just seemed too hard (see Passport). In the end, Daniel’s experience made me suspect it was an attempt to solve a problem that didn’t really exist. I’ll be curious to see if somebody figures the problem out and just nails it.

Great chin-stroking subject …