As David Lenehan reported today, Digg is the latest company to declare its support for OpenID – the decentralized single sign-on service. This follows on from recent announcements of support from Microsoft and AOL. And as Techcrunch noted, Yahoo, LiveJournal, and Wikipedia are some other organizations that had previously announced their support.
It’s clear that OpenID is gathering a good head of steam as the single sign-on mechanism of choice in the web 2.0 world. But let’s take a poll on how many people are actually using it right now. Even though OpenID is a great initiative, R/WW’s identity guru Jitendra Gupta has pointed out severaltimes that OpenID is not without flaws – particularly in the areas of security and authentication. So many people may be reticent about using OpenID, at least for now. Another issue is that many people use fake identities on the Web or have multiple IDs, particularly those in the younger generation.
Please participate in the poll below and let us know in the comments to this post your thoughts on if/when real users will start utilizing OpenID.
Update: I forgot to mention that Emre Sokullu wrote a great analysis of OpenID for R/WW at the start of 2007. It includes a screencast explaining what OpenID is and how it’s used.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)