I’ve been a fan of the OpenID concept since I heard about it, and a big fan since I learned more about it at MashupCamp a while back. However, I’ve never really felt a particular need to use my OpenID until recently.
For online services that require registration, I generally use the same username and a hashed password – pretty easy stuff to remember. This works great as long as you get to choose your username.
Recently, Crowd Favorite has been working on a number of projects with clients that already use BaseCamp, so we’ve been given logins on their BaseCamp accounts. When they set us up, they generally choose the username for us, which means I’ve got a variety of BaseCamp usernames:
- alex
- alexking
- aking
- alex.king
and probably a couple I can’t recall offhand. When I need to log in to one of these sites, remembering which username I need to use is what slows me down.
In the last few weeks I’ve converted all of these BaseCamp logins to use my OpenID instead, and it’s solved the problem beautifully. No more trying four different usernames before I can log in – just OpenID and go.
It will be great when implementing OpenID is a standard, built-in feature of all development tools. Until then, support for OpenID just moved up the feature list for my own products.
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You know, you could always prefer OpenID authentication for posting comments here; it’d cut down on the spam. As soon as I get over being lazy about doing it on GFMorris.com, I’ll do it there, since that’s the place I feel led to do such things.
I’m glad to hear it — I’m patiently waiting for more services out there to adopt OpenID. It would make commenting on blogs a breeze instead of all the various accounts and captchas that are standard fare for throwing a “first post” on the pile. 🙂
I don’t really think about OpenID for blog commenting because I have no desire to require registration for commenting. I guess I could enable registration via OpenID and offer it in lieu of the pseduo-CAPTCHA, but I really don’t want to deal with all the user accounts.
I don’t think the way that Dougal implements the VerseLogic WordPress OpenID plugin generates accounts. I agree that it’s probably overkill to generate lots of accounts, and I think OpenID is a solid gateway for this.
Conceptually, of course. I’ve been too lazy to implement it. 😉
I’m not sure how Dougal implements it (you could be right), but in order to be “logged in”, there needs to be a WP user.
From the docs: