It used some another (failed?) provider before (which connected accounts to Gmail, Yahoo, etc.)

HN was using Clickpass (YC Summer 07), which was acquired and shuttered by Janrain early last year. Amusingly enough, Stack Overflow still has a (broken) Clickpass button on its login page.

If I recall correctly, Clickpass was a centralized OpenID proxy, whereas Persona is trying to bootstrap a fully decentralized protocol. We don't want to even be able to track you. :)

[Edit: Corrected YC cohort. Thanks wamatt!]

I believe Clickpass was YC '07. Falling short of a Series A raise, Yola/Synthasite acquired them in 2008 [1]

Then a few years later (2012), Yola sold the IP and users to Janrain [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=402973

[2] http://janrain.com/clickpass-acquired-by-janrain/

EDIT: my pleasure callahad :)

"Amusingly enough, Stack Overflow still has a (broken) Clickpass button on its login page."

Where? I can't see it.

The button was removed a few hours ago: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/192501/remove-obsole...

It had (has?) OpenID support.

had. was dropped a while back :'(

Hilariously it was dropped with no real notification, and one day my account just stopped working. I had to make a new one, because there was no way to access my previous account.

No where in that headline does it mention OpenID -- and I have no idea what ClickPass is. Nor was it a persistent announcement; it was just a regular story. Perhaps I didn't even check HN that particular day?

There are many ways they could have notified OpenID users that would have worked -- this wasn't really one of them!

Yeah, I very luckily had my account still logged in on one browser, and was able to save it :|