6 Reasons You Will Love OpenID
Here are six reasons OpenID is great that other sites haven’t seemingly mentioned:
- Convenience
Try out your OpenID on the new phpBB OpenID-enabled test forum. After a quick authentication with your OpenID provider, phpbb has created an account for you with all the details filled in.No email back-and-forth. You can post your comment to a new forum/blog that requires registration with hardly any delay.
- Withhold your email address
Email is generally not required for most OpenID-enabled sites currently. They no longer handle your password so the primary reason for requiring an email no longer exists. - Keep track of which sites have what information centrally
OpenID providers like MyOpenID.com keep track of which sites you’ve authenticated with and what data you gave them. - Stop typing in all your personal info again and again
Your OpenID provider will give the site you’re logging in to the data. Registration is practically instant. You decide what info is provided too. Don’t trust the site? Don’t provide them with your postcode or email address then. - Reputation
Your OpenID can actually build up a reputation because it is linked to you. Nobody can masquerade as you unless they can guess your password. So you should make it a good one
- Site-wide registration
Another cool benefit of OpenID will be sites like archlinux.org, or kde.org which currently have 5 or 6 separate services that require separate registration and logon. With OpenID you can authorise the entire domain, then each service, provided it has OpenID support would automatically be authenticated.
People seem a little scared of OpenID, but I’ve been using it for a few months and I find it to be absolutely a step forward in how I use the Internet. I’m having more fun now with OpenID as I can sign up for fun little services with no qualms about registration or what data I’m handing over.
If you want a quick and easy OpenID, try FreeYourID.com, you get an ID of the form firstname.lastname.name, it’s free, no credit-card details are taken, and you can start using it straight away. I already registered http://max.howell.name, so bad luck if you wanted to annoy me
Fun OpenID-enabled sites to try:
http://jyte.com
http://stikis.com
http://imakemistakes.com
None of these sites require anything other than authentication, so they are fun and hassle free.
Fun OpenID-enabled sites to try: http://jyte.com http://stikis.com http://imakemistakes.com None of these sites require anything other than authentication, so they are fun and hassle free. Comments here pls!
Amarok Blog February 21st, 2007 at 14:08I hope forums will give an alternative to OpenID, and not force it on me. Most of the time, posting anonymous is good enough. After all, it’s the content of the post that matters, not who posted it.
Forced registration sucks. But with forced registration, I could at least pick a random alias, or use bugmenot. Can I still do this with OpenID?
For one, there’s no reason your OpenID should be traceable to you. But secondly, yes you can have as many OpenIDs as you like. So just register a random alias at a random OpenID provider and there you go.
There really are no disadvantages to this system, afaict.
There is a seventh reason. You can easily set up your site/blog to be an OpenID. Here’s a quick way of doing that with a WordPress blog:
http://eran.sandler.co.il/openid-delegate-wordpress-plugin/
As for FreeYourID, it is neither free nor your ID:
http://blog.phpbb.cc/2007/02/14/thank-you-for-not-registering/
testing my openid…
OpenID’s a great thing, and I’m hoping that more sites can implement support for it. If you don’t want to trust your ID to a 3rd party, you can very easily install your own OpenID server (as I decided to do, myself)