~ 2 min read

OpenID - The end of multiple passwords?

I’ve been hearing some really good stuff about openID recently. For those who don’t know, this is a online identity standard which promises to be the end of having multiple passwords at just about every single website you visit. It’s recently risen to light with the adoption by WordPress.com as a provider and digg as an adopter.Complaints against wordpress.com’s non-allowance of logins with openID’s created anywhere else than wordpress.com seem quite well founded. For those whom wordpress.com is not their original openID provider, it means that creation of these accounts will go unused and the identity problem seems to be perpetuated somewhat. If you do have your own domain, you can go ahead and create your own openID account there, but you won’t be able to sign into wordpress.com with it.I had an idea off of the back of coming up with a memorable name for an application which makes use of openID as I read this this morning, but after a look around, it seems its already been done to death. Alas, this is always the way. The offering by the PhD students over at claimID looks great and is just the sort of thing I’ve been looking for. I may give it a bash at some point, although someones comment that it looked too much like “chlamydia.com”, probably would put me off putting it down on a cv.There’s lots of useful examples and information at openID enabled. You can see a short (5 min) video about openID here, presented by Scott Kveton, CEO of JanRain, who build identity services for the web.