Don't worry. If this catches on, Yahoo and Google will get into the provider act, too. You'll have your choice of big corporations to trust with your identity.

Don't worry. If this catches on, Yahoo and Google will get into the provider act, too. You'll have your choice of big corporations to trust with your identity. We might even see Microsoft get back into the act. I've been expecting OpenID to evolve into this. The whole problem with OpenID from the site owner's standpoint is the dependencies: If you allow anyone to log in from any OpenID provider whatsoever, you're essentially creating an open-ended dependency on thousands of providers across the web. If a provider has a security problem, X% of your users have a security problem; If a provider goes down, X% of your users go down; If a provider offers a bad login experience -- by showing users tons of ads, or trying to lure them to a competitor as they log in -- you've got a bad login experience that you cannot fix except by forcing some users to switch providers. This solves all that. You get a simple relationship with one provider: Facebook. You get permission to use Facebook's logo on your site, and to use their brand to reassure your users that you know what you're doing. You don't have to temporarily redirect users to another site in that confusing, phisher-esque OpenID way -- the users type their password into your own site, into a page that you design. If Facebook's API starts giving you problems, you send email to a single service department: Facebook's. Of course, I believe this entire plan got rejected by the market the first time around, when it was called "Microsoft Passport", but perhaps times have changed.