[jasonkester]

Something that lets me use my email address as my ID.

I can remember my email address. I can't even remember which openID provider I used to sign up for StackOverflow, let alone how they expect me to form the URL that I use for my login.

So once a month, when my cookie expires, I get to perform a forgot-password-like action, where I dig through my email to find my username, then try several combinations of it and claimid.net (or was it .org) until it lets me in. But I'm not in. I still have to type in my username and password and, click OK, then click OK on a second screen.

That's on the order of 10 more steps than it takes me to type in my email address and password. I remember my email. And I can type it in 400 milliseconds.

The thing that replaces OpenID needs to understand that.

[patd]

Just put a delegate on a web page URL you'll remember. Like on your personal website.

I use my own page and use the OpenId delegate meta-tag to point to the domain that I also don't remember: http://openid.net/specs/openid-authentication-1_1.html#deleg...

This way you only have to remember your own URL like: http://openid.mydomain.com and the password that you've chosen.

[jasonkester]

Is that actually a serious suggestion? Is that what you'd tell your non-technical users when they asked you what an openid was?

Sentences that start with the word "just" should describe something easy to do. Like, you know, using your existing email address as your unique ID.

[patd]

That's not the suggestion I give to non-technical users, that's the suggestion that I give to you that took the time to learn what OpenId is but complains about it.

What I tell website developers is to add a login with Google, Yahoo, ... + OpenId (Google and Yahoo are openId providers) and each will redirect users to the correct OpenId endpoint (the one from yahoo, the one from google or your own).

And I don't say anything to non-technical users. They will see a "login with Yahoo" or "login with Facebook" or "login with Gmail" and they won't even ask me questions about OpenID. The ones that know what OpenId is and have their own custom URL will use it. Others will use the endpoints provided by Yahoo or Google and won't know what OpenID is and they don't need to.

[jasonkester]

Have you done any testing to see how many users you lose by doing this? There is, after all, a percentage of your users who will see your "login with Yahoo" message and not understand what you mean, then leave when they can't find a way to register.

You seem to think that number would be low. Experience with users & registration leads me to believe that it will be quite high. I personally don't plan to implement openID, so I can't do any testing. I'd be curious to see what your numbers say.