I was thinking about using openid for my international site. So I was reading about providers and openid and perhaps I just don’t get it. I see what they claim are the benefits, but when I see it in use on other sites, it doesn’t seem to make things simpler but actually more complicated.
If I go to livejournal.com or whatever and I want to sign in, I have a list of like 10 organizations to sign in from. I have google/yahoo/facebook/twitter… so I choose facebook, sounds easy enough. Ok I’m signed in after accepting the website. Now I go to another site, they don’t offer facebook, only google and yahoo, so I choose yahoo… then another site they don’t offer yahoo, only google, pretty soon I end up having to memorize which sites I used which providers don’t I? because if I change to use a different provider on a site won’t that be creating a new account on the site? I’m obviously not understanding something here, can someone please help?
Any OpenID system worth a salt lets you type in your own URL. So even if Facebook isn’t offered in the provider listing on some site, you just need to type in the Facebook OpenID endpoint URL, and you’ll be able to authenticate using Facebook.