3 ms·

Seconded. I don't understand OpenID, but it works, and it's not tied to a single (ominous) company.

• Lewisham 16y ago
  The problem with OpenID is that takeup is orders of magnitude lower than Facebook. That hasn't changed for years, and I don't think anyone really expects it to. Users can't use it as a direct facing log-in because users don't tie themselves to URLs, they tie themselves to email addresses. OpenID eventually asks you to trust someone to hold your sign-on details, it may as well be a company most users already do. I somewhat favor the StackOverflow approach, which is "we won't authenticate you, but here's a bunch of services that do", but inevitably I forget which service is actually tied to my account. This is how it's been with my HN account for a while, I loathe deleting the cookie, as I spent 10 minutes figuring out what ClickPass wants. TripIt has both Facebook and Google Accounts. I'd probably expand to Yahoo! and Live Mail (if MS has anything for that) and leave it there.