OpenID: Your Passport To The Web

If you look at the way a typical website runs, whether a social-network, a forum, or a shopping portal, most sites require you to register for an account to utilize everything that they have to offer. By now, if you’re anything like me, you have accounts on virtually every imaginable website on the web. On a daily basis you may login to two or three of those accounts and the rest you probably used once to try something out, place an order, or access a feature that was tagged as “members-only.”

Luckily, there is a cure around the corner. OpenID is an excellent attempt geared at fixing the currently broken system of accounts on the internet. Imagine a world in which you had one e-mail address, one username, and one password that served as your passport to the web - no more registering for accounts on sites to access their profiles, no more signing up just to place an order.

OpenID has been around for a while, but is only now just starting to gain enough momentum to be a truly useful service. MySpace, today, announced their support for the OpenID system and there are rumors cieculating that other major sites including Digg could be soon to follow.

The biggest problems facing OpenID at the moment are a combination of its relatively unknown status and the existence of competing products like Facebook Connect and Microsoft’s Live ID service. It’s an excellent technology that could, indeed, become the future of the web as we know it, but we may still be a ways off from seeing a widespread adoption of the OpenID protocol on more of the sites we tend to use.