Agreed. Though it would only work if email providers also became OpenID providers (which admittedly would have been very possible), or else having two things th

Agreed. Though it would only work if email providers also became OpenID providers (which admittedly would have been very possible), or else having two things that look just like email addresses could cause similar confusion. An advantage of URLs is that you have the choice of whether to give your email address to the site. Myopenid.com will prompt you for whatever information the site requests, and you can even choose which email address (if any) to provide the site. Sites which use an email address for login currently require you to remember which spam email address you gave them. The indirection offered by URLs is quite powerful too: See jerf's comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1916033 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1916033