The choice of signon system depends on the type of site you have. I want my users to be able to sign up and use the service as quickly as possible. Picking use

The choice of signon system depends on the type of site you have. I want my users to be able to sign up and use the service as quickly as possible. Picking usernames can be a major source of frustration, my current thinking is the signup box should be just asking for email address and password, and roll from there. Quick and easy. A few years ago Microsoft stopped allowing third-party sites to use Passport as a signin to their sites (except partners). Although they allow it again, I would take that as a strong warning not to rely on a third party for signin systems. Facebook ask a lot of questions when signing up. If I didn't have a FB account, I would't be inclined to use your service if I had to tie it to a social network signin (unless your service was a facebook application). OpenID is a massive disaster. I spent an entire day as a user reading up on it and trying to signup and use my ID on multiple sites. The whole thing is terribly complex and confusing. Every site implemented it badly. Do you want to support OpenID 1 or 2? Do your users care? Last week I spoke to a developer on a massive site (a hugely popular new-generation audio site) and we agreed implementing an OpenID container is far from straightforward. You have to support many different things and some sites still throw errors when using OpenID Delegation (allow you to use your own domain to signin). Unless you have a very good reason to, I'd suggest to keep far away from OpenID until they get their act together. To recap, I want to register for a new site as quickly as possible. Just prompt for an email address and password and save yourself and your users a lot of hassle.