Opening Our Eyes to OpenID

Sign-ons can be a real pain, as you are forced to create ever more accounts at sites. A single sign-on is the obvious solution, but getting everyone to agree on a standard is hard. So it's particularly good to see that OpenID is not only taking off, but an open standard to boot.

Here's one of the best introductions to OpenID that I've come across:

As the most basic level, your OpenID identity is a unique URL. It can be a URL that you directly control (such as that of your personal Web page or blog) or one provided to you by a third-party service, such as an OpenID provider. In that sense, a site's use of OpenID identities is no different than using email addresses as identifiers: they are unique to each user and are verifiable. But you can publicly display an OpenID identity without attracting spam.