Jason over at Expat Software has written about how much friction is involved in signing up for StackOverflow because of their choice to use OpenID.
Compared to the zero friction process required to sign up to use his Twiddla service (just click new meeting) StackOverflow comes in at a frustrating 14 steps or so.
And he’s right of course, you want as close as zero friction to use your site as possible and despite being a certified ‘good idea’ OpenID is too just too complex a procedure for the average Joe to bother with.
However, in the case of StackOverlow the determining factor for its success or failure is going to be its ability to keep the signal to noise ratio high and one way of doing this might just be to make the barrier to entry a little higher that it could be and help encourage the unwashed masses to bugger off back to YouTube to spew drivel.
I don’t know if this was a deliberate decision or not – indeed in the StackOverflow podcasts you get an indication of the disagreements between Joel, Jeff and other team members about the use of OpenID – but they do recognise that some barrier to entry could be a good thing for their site.
Me – I’ve got high hopes for the StupidFilter project – OMG, LoL !!!!!