Too many OpenID registras considered harmful?

WordPress Matt writes that your WordPress.com blog URL is now usable as an OpenID login. I’m thrilled about that, but what happens when you’ve got an ID, sitting at MyOpenID? Does OpenID support merging of profiles, so you only maintain your OpenID at one location?

I now have two OpenID accounts – one at WordPress.com and one at MyOpenID. How does this help my overall problem of only wanting to have one OpenID to login to all my services? When I login to Zooomr or Livejournal, am I doing so with the ID listed at MyOpenID or WordPress.com? Alas, I tried it, and there is confusion. The onus is now on me to remember which OpenID registra I’ve used on which site.

Beginning to think that OpenID in itself isn’t terribly useful, if all its going to create are a lot of registras, and a lot of fragmentation. If they wanted a good model to base this on, why not look at plain Jane DNS? You can have many different registras, but the bottom line is, bytebot.net is always going to be me.

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2 Comments

  1. Bjorn says:

    Are you aware that you can use bytebot as your openid and delegate to a registrar? You can change openid registrar later without changing all your bytebot entries; just change the delegation.

    Check http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers/

  2. byte says:

    Thanks for that bjorn. But I’d rather not have to run yet another service…

    I envisioned OpenID to be more like how DNS “just works”. I didn’t want to see so many “registras”. I don’t want my livejournal account, wordpress.com account and my open id account all being openids?

    Now, I’ve got more that one that I need. So I guess the solution is to run it on bytebot.net, and register/use that everywhere. But what about all the useless accounts that I’ll also have in addition provided by wordpress.com, or lj, or something?


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