Web users are schizophrenic, and not by choice: They possess multiple identities to access sometimes dozens of online resources, but juggling those user name/password combos is burdensome, time consuming ... and often a slippery slope to insecure practices. Who hasn't seen monitors adorned with Post-it Notes full of identity info?
The OpenID Foundation wants to change that. On the user side, its community-developed system aims to let users create a single identity for signing on to an unlimited number of Web sites, relieving them of the need to maintain a variety of IDs and passwords. The OpenID framework also lets users control which identity attributes, such as e-mail and date of birth, can be shared with a given site. OpenID may also appeal to Web site owners looking to build large user communities, so the foundation has designed its spec to be simple and inexpensive to deploy.
