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I agree, that's a bit irritating. I'll reach out to Joel/Jeff and see if they're open to adding other options.

But, you can't argue with the success of Stack Overflow (despite being only OpenID, it's done pretty well)

For what it's worth someone asked Joel this after the first DevDays in Boston and he said adding a normal username/password login was at the top of their list.

stackoverflow doesn't just use openid, they give you like a hundred different options. It's pretty surprising that they don't have it for stackexchange.

I just rechecked. StackOverflow does support a bunch of different providers -- but they're all based on OpenID. No support for Facebook or a "standard" username/email/password model.

I think for the SO userbase, it's likely fine. But, for other more mainstream audiences, OpenID is not ideal. Too much friction in the process.

StackOverflow does just use openid. It just happens that yahoo, google, facebook, etc are all openid providers. But SO only accepts openid as a login method. (Hence SE is the same currently, but that will change.)

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