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In the world of universal logins there is a young upstart in town, OpenID. OpenID is entering a space where some big time players have failed most notable among the Microsoft Passport. Microsoft hasn't given up (now using Microsoft Live ID) but it may be doomed to fail for the same reasons Passport did - one of which is trust.
Big centralized authentication management facilities have a couple of points of failure - the most critical of which is that a lot of people just don't trust the authentication provider with their information. Microsoft, in particular, has shown some ethical greyness in their business dealings in the past so it is only natural that many people would be reluctant to let Passport be their online identity clearinghouse. The second problem is that it is centralized so once you start depending on it you can't change your mind and start letting someone else host your profile without it breaking all of the accounts you have setup related to that online identity (your Passport).
This is where OpenID comes in. OpenID is a really cool universial authentication mechanism that is both open and decentralized. Anyone who wants can create start up an OpenID server and your OpenID can be changed to point to any of those servers at any time you feel like moving your profile. So, if Microsoft were to start an OpenID server and you signed up with them, but later decided you wanted to use Yahoo!'s then you could just change the pointer in at your OpenID and all of your accounts, all over the web, would then start to look to this new provider for authentication.
So, how does this work? Well, your OpenID is a website you own and you simply embed a very small nugget of HTML into your page that points to the OpenID server you are currently using. Then, so long as the site your trying to login to supports OpenID accounts you can login with your OpenID url. Once you choose to login with that OpenID url the website you want to access will look at that URL, get the nugget of HTML you embedded, and then send you off to your OpenID serer for authenticaion. Once you login to the OpenID server you are automatically sent back to the site you were trying to access - except now you are logged in. Even cooler, if you are just creating the account to attach to your OpenID account your OpenID profile (at least the parts you feel like sharing) can automatically be moved into that websites profile for you.
Now you don't have to trust just one provider, you don't have to remember hundreds of usernames and password combinations, and you have full control of your online identity. Slowly but surely more and more sites are adopting OpenID. The more that do the better for all of us. My OpenID is http://rawlinson.us/bill - what's yours?
Oh, and if you are a Newsvine Staff member please consider incorporating OpenID into your authentication scheme (just make sure those of us with accounts can connect our newsvine account to our OpenID).
