The Skinny on OpenID

Once upon a time, before there was OpenID, you had to have a separate username and password for every single website that you visited. This was bad for many, many reasons. It was bad because somehow you have to remember a zillion usernames and passwords, or at the very least store them in your browser - which could cause much headache if you tried to log in from another machine. It was also bad because it required you to trust every website that you visited. Exactly how secure is their login mechanism?

Well, thankfully, those days are on their way out. OpenID is an open source, cross-platform, open standard, system which solves all of these problems. How it works is this: You sign up with an "identity provider" of which there are many from which to choose. (If you've techy enough, you can even be your own identity provider, since all the standards are completely open). When you sign up, you'll get your own openID identifier, which looks a bit like a URL. (Typically it might look something like "Your.Name.myopenid.com"). Once you're signed up, you can use your OpenID on any website where you see the OpenID symbol.

Why don't you offer both?

Some web sites give you a choice of both OpenID and the traditional username/password method of logging in. This is sort of a transitional phase which will go away in time when OpenID gains more traction. Obviously it benefits you to have an OpenID, for all the reasons already stated, but what is maybe not so obvious is that it also benefits me. If I were to use the old-fashioned username/password system - even as a backup system - then I would have to maintain a database of all those usernames and passwords; I would have to do my own authentication; I would also have to keep your email address and maybe some so-called "security questions" in case you lost your password. It just makes a lot more sense to leave that whole shebang to someone else - someone who specialises in authentication.

Besides which, OpenID is the future. Separate signons for every site you visit was a dumb idea to begin with, and I'm not going to perpetuate a dumb idea.

How do I get an OpenID?

If you want a really quick answer, I personally recommend signing up with myOpenID.

If you want to put more thought into it, hunt around and do a little research for yourself. Yahoo do an openID service, so if you already have a Yahoo! ID (e.g. if you're a member of one or more Yahoo! groups) then you can just use "yahoo.com" as your openID identifier - that's pretty easy, but Yahoo's service is very inflexible and lacks many useful features like s-reg and profiles. (They're useful, believe me).

The place to start looking is OpenID.net. This is the official OpenID website, and they list a fair few OpenID providers. You can also learn a lot from Wikipedia. Hey, just Google it - you're not dumb!

Finally, there is a fantastic OpenID feature list here, so you can see how various OpenID providers stack up against each other.