The Email Wars

OpenID is a web standard that is growing fast in the past few months. It has been around since 2005 but now the giants like Google, MSN, Yahoo. IBM, and others are joining up. I talked to Scott Kveton of the OpenID board and Luke Sontag at Vidoop (side note: they just opened a Portland office) to see what impact it could have on lead capture for businesses at SXSW.

My initial thoughts were that it would hurt lead capture on sites and slow the ability to capture data on visitors, leads and customers. If the process lives outside of the site with a 2nd and 3rd party hosting the data on an individual, how would you your your brand grow a list?

Here is what I learned:
Using OpenID and Vidoop you can get the information you require for a download, shipping info, membership etc with a data pass. The user is in control of their info and can choose to share or not share with you. The system tells users what info the site would like to get from them to continue. So if you want name, email, etc you just use the OpenID API to “ask” for that data. My thoughts around this was from a user experience would that kill the interaction. From them I learned that you can require certain elements and the API tells users what is requested and then allows them to approve what they want to share with you. So jury is still partially out there. I need to talk to some people and brands that are actively using it and see what the experience and changes to lead capture/membership etc is like.

But here is what I do like with it. It allows a user to rapidly complete a form or information with one click. It is similar in my mind to MSN’s passport system, but slicker and has additional levels of security on the user side with the integration and use of Vidoop.

So where does this leave us? Not quite sure yet. Sorry. But if YOU have an experiences with it and can share some examples or ideas I would love to hear them.