I’ve followed a lot of the happenings with OpenID over the past nine months or so. I signed up to a few of the providers (Verisignlabs and MyOpenID) and I used it successfully to log on to Zooomr.

Two announcements caught my eye since yesterday. First Microsoft announced they are going to support it - well done Kim Cameron and gang. Second, the ClaimID guys have announced a change of direction and they are going to be an OpenID provider too.

So, by my reckoning we have the following providers of OpenID:

  • Verisign
  • MyOpenID
  • Typekey
  • Technorati
  • ClaimID
  • Who else?

Now for the important bit - useful sites that let you login using your OpenID credentials. Emmmmmmmmmm

  • Zooomr
  • Ma.gnolia
  • Jyte
  • LiveJournal
  • Annnnnnnnnddddddddd?

Is the balance ever so slightly off here? Should the second list not be in the thousands?

Even worse, whilst Technorati are an OpenID provider, they won’t let you use OpenID to log on to their site. Not only that, but as with so much of Technorati recently (and it pains me to say it as I love them), I couldn’t use my Technorati profile to log on to Jyte (“There was an error with the request. Please try again later.")

On the upside, I’ve always been a big fan of Fred and the ClaimID guys and one of their new features is wonderful. By adding two lines to the header of my various blogs, I can now login to OpenID-enabled sites using https://argolon.com or http://blog.loudervoice.com. Now I don’t even have to remember one URL. I am the URL. Aside: This worked on Ma.gnolia and Jyte but not on Zooomr.

The key feature ALL OpenID-enabld sites need to support is the ability to let me login using OpenID and then let me associate an existing non-OpenID login with that identity. Ma.gnolia and Jyte both do this slickly. It doesn’t even seem to be possible in LiveJournal, when I logged in using OpenID, it gave me a new account. And I cannot figure out if there is a way of linking a TypeKey account to an external OpenID identity. This is from the people who invented OpenID!

Despite all the apparent support and buzz, OpenID will remain a techie novelty until we see a huge increase in the number of sites that support it. C’mon Yahoo, do it, do it.

And no more OpenID providers, enough already!

Technorati Tags: OpenID, ClaimID, Jyte, MyOpenID, Verisignlabs, Zooomr, Ma.gnolia, TypeKeySix Apart