OpenID Usability: Two Solutions That Could Take OpenID Mainstream

This sentence is priceless:

Already the home of the inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham), the initiator of the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds), a boatload of RSS and OpenSource-heads, Portland Oregon is also becoming a hotbed of OpenID work.

OpenID will succeed because the awesome presence of Linus Torvalds is filling the air over Portland with tiny molecules of Smart!

Seriously, has Torvalds ever uttered a word about OpenID in his life? If so, could we have a link? If not, what the heck is he doing in this article?

Ach, it seems like the obvious answer is that the browser autofills your OpenID url and, if the site is set up all Ajax-like, it then goes off and logs you in on arrival.

Very simple. As transparent as Basic Authentication with HTACCESS in fact!

(oh yeah, this is progress! progress I tell you!)

The problem I have with OpenID is that I enjoy having separate accounts on various sites... it keeps my activities compartmentalized and I value that sense security over a universal ID. Furthermore, I'm not always interested in having a known identity on some sites... Get my drift?! :)

It'll catch on when articles don't include so many if/but/maybes. My eyes tend to just glaze over whenever I read about OpenID, so many fuzzy caveats.