I also find OpenID hard to explain to people who are actually smart and fairly technical. It seems to fill people with low-level dread and confusion. This is o

I also find OpenID hard to explain to people who are actually smart and fairly technical. It seems to fill people with low-level dread and confusion. This is one of the fundamental reasons why OpenID is a failure. Its complexity-to-utility ratio is way out of whack. OpenID always reminds me of one of Spolsky's lines: For some reason most people seem to be born without the part of the brain that understands pointers. Pointers require a complex form of doubly-indirected thinking that some people just can’t do, and it’s pretty crucial to good programming. What is OpenID? It's a system that asks you, not for a username and password, but for a pointer to a site that wants your username and password. And, lo, Spolsky is right: it causes many, many people's heads to explode. Nevertheless, if OpenID prevented cancer everyone on Earth would try to figure it out. There'd be special schools to teach it. But all OpenID does is replace usernames and passwords. Most people use the same ones on every site. Or they have cookies turned on so they rarely have to login, and they use email reminders on those rare occasions when they do. Or they pay their $35 for 1password and just solve the problem. There are a few use cases that can't be solved like this, but not enough of them to justify the overhead of OpenID for most people. OpenID might have a future as a coder's tool, like SSH. Coders can learn to use the protocol fairly quickly, and they're more likely to understand the security tradeoffs.