OpenID is not that hard to understand and will become even easier when more social sites become providers. The concept of your Facebook profile being your unive

OpenID is not that hard to understand and will become even easier when more social sites become providers. The concept of your Facebook profile being your universal online identity is quite intuitive, especially to young people. There is also a lack of best practices for consumers. When UI conventions are established and users become accustomed to them, it won't seem so confusing. Ideally, the creation of an OpenID associated "account" with a consumer would happen transparently the first time the OpenID is used, if it even needs to happen at all. As for developers, OpenID may be more complicated to implement than conventional user/pass but it is also more uniform. Once there are mature libraries for common platforms, programmers will save a lot of time versus implementing user/pass from scratch. (I would not consider many current ones to be mature). Anyway, I'm not so sure OpenID is more complicated than a proper auth system with email verification and recovery.