I believe out of a legitimate concern of a few companies taking ownership of the web. If there weren't standards who knows where we would be. Standardization is the reason we all don't live under rules of AOL and Internet Explorer. Now the power has shifted to three dominant players (Apple, Google and Facebook) potential controlling everything. Initiatives to standardize new technologies or trends continues to be important as the web evolves into new areas. Gamification has a lot of space for standardization. Mozilla is a great organization to spearhead new standard initiatives.
That's a good question. I'm not sure if there's any list of issuers. However, it is an open project and therefore any entity could become an issuer. They list a few possible sources on the FAQ. I think many of the code education startups, such as Code School, Treehouse and Codecademy would be an excellent fit.
This is an element of gamification. Gamification is the use of game thinking and game mechanics to solve problems and engage people. Within game mechanics there are six components. One component is achievement represented by badges.
I tried it out as it's an interesting concept. Unfortunately, while I can register and also participate in the introductory badges, whenever I try to push to my backpack then confirm who I am, it seems to get stuck on authenticating me forever :(
The reason we're even presenting the user with a dialog is because we want to prevent badge spamming, whereby third-party issuers spam a user's backpack with badges that they don't want. Consequently, we need the backpack to ask for the user's consent. This will be accomplished via an iframe embedded in the issuer's page.
The only sensitive information that a user needs to enter in this flow is login credentials. Since authentication is done via BrowserID, which opens in a pop-up window, the consequences of spoof attacks are minimal–so long as the user knows to look at domain names in their address bar and BrowserID's UI."
I was really interested until I got to this part. Asking the user for permission each time I want to award a badge? Complete fail. Mozilla doesn't get UI.
This is going to be more of a pain in the ass than Vista's Security popup or whatever it's called. It'll be the #1 way to make users hate using your application, I assure you.
Badges need to enhance the application not interrupt it. I have never seen a badge application pause the application to award you with the badge. The entire concept is pretty nuts. It's a good idea, such a shame about the implementation.
Mozilla can easily provide an interface to delete badges you don't want, or ban applications that spam you from the badge system. The whole threat model idea is just self-sabotage.
