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.