from Hacker News

Ask HN: Who is using Mozilla's Persona?

by mkelley on 10/29/12, 1:10 PM with 2 comments

From the website - http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/ ... "At Mozilla, we believe that your online identity should belong exclusively to you. With that in mind, we created Persona to improve the way you sign in to websites."

What I would like to know is... who is using Persona, and if you aren't using it - why? It seems like the smoothest least disruptive login/authorization service I've seen so far. If you don't know what Persona is, I suggest you check out the website. It just takes a few lines of code and markup to add Persona to your website. So why isn't this gaining more traction? It makes more sense than Github, FB, Google, Twitter, etc... auth offerings. Your thoughts?

  • by sergiotapia on 10/29/12, 4:27 PM

    The thing is, some websites do not lend themselves well to it. If you're building a social site like 9gag or whatever, you kind of WANT that Facebook Login button to be there front and center. Your audience kind of expects it.

    If you want to build an ecommerce website, where does Persona fit in? You and I know it's kosher and legit, Mr. Bob the 53 year old with a credit card instantly see's red flags.

    This is a major problem - where will persona fit in?

    I do love the system though. I even wrote an example on how to use it in an MVC3 application and even edited the official Mozilla Persona wiki to expand some of the topics.

    https://github.com/sergiotapia/ASP.Net-MVC3-Persona-Demo

  • by rachelbythebay on 10/29/12, 4:17 PM

    I'm using it on my scanner site. Logging in lets you use a few more features that otherwise would be unavailable. It wasn't terribly difficult to add to my stack. The hardest part was finding and integrating a reasonable JSON interpreter to deal with the return. I wound up using a library called jansson.

    http://scanner.rachelbythebay.com/main - hit the cog/gear link on a call and you'll see the login button. Notice that once you're logged in, the "ops" popup drops the button and adds a few more features without you having to do anything else.