I’ll admit it. I’ve put off purposefully joining Open ID for no real reason. But now, whether we want to or not, you and I (well, I’m guessing you are, anyway) are being jumped in to the world of Open ID. Because not only are Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail (aka Hotmail) joining the Open ID ranks, allowing their logins to become Open ID logins, but so is Gmail.
If you’ve forgotten/never learned what Open ID is, it’s like a universal login for participating sites. So now you can use your Gmail address to log in to other participating services. Like Zoho. Don’t everybody leave at once, though.
As TechCrunch notes, it’s not clear whether Gmail will also accept all Open ID logins. I’m guessing not. Says TC,
Google appears to be an OpenID “provider,” not a “relying party.” In other words, you cannot sign into Google with your Yahoo account. But this still helps the OpenID movement as a whole because it gives smaller sites more incentive to join as “relying parties.” Among the first sites to accept Gmail accounts for sign in are Zoho and Plaxo.
Open ID faces some competition from Facebook Connect, but, admittedly, not much. Future additions to the Open ID program may also include AOL and MySpace.
So, are you ready to sign in to every single website with the same login?
