OpenIDOpenID has been a hot topic lately. Most noticeably on the blogs of developers and designers, but with the recent support pledged by both Microsoft and AOL, the buzz is spreading like wildfire.

Not to be one to let the bandwagon pass me by, I decided to give it a go. First things first, I needed to find an OpenID provider. I decided to use ClaimID, a service that I had flirted with in the past, but hadn’t yet signed up. After creating my account I now had my ID, so I set out to use it.

One of the fist sites I tested it out on was Wikitravel a free online world travel guide. I learned about the site through Simon Willison’s excellent OpenID screencast. (If you haven’t viewed it yet, I highly recommend that you do.) I clicked on the link at the top to switch my login preference to OpenID, and typed in the address that ClaimID had provided. I was briefly redirected to ClaimID’s authentication screen where I typed in my password. Then I was back on Wikitravel, signed in and ready to browse. No account creation forms. One user ID, one password. Awesome.

After that I decided to go one step further and use my site’s URI as my OpenID. With ClaimID still as my provider, all I needed to do was paste a few small lines of code into the <head> of my page and that’s it. I was logging into OpenID sites with my blog address.

Very cool.

While OpenID has been a getting a great deal more attention in the past few months, it still has a long way to go. Early adopters and geeks aside, the majority of people on the web either don’t know about OpenID or don’t understand it and its potential. Even with more and more sites offering the alternative to login with OpenID instead of the standard username and password, many more need to step up and start supporting it. Namely the social networking sites that the tech savvy frequent (Twitter, LastFM, Flickr, etc.). The more sites that offer this, the more we will be able to reap its benefits.

It will be most interesting to see where this will lead. Portable social networks perhaps? I surely hope so.

OpenID, Technology