Xavier Media®

On the 10th of March this year I wrote about OpenID, a service that lets you use the same account from one provider to login at other sites without registration . Now it turns out that both Google and Microsoft will join other companies like Yahoo, WordPress.com and AOL in supporting this fantastic login feature.

If you remember my post from the 10th of March I wrote that Google already accepted OpenID, but that was only for their blog service Blogger.com but now that will change a lot. You will be able to use your Gmail account to login at other web sites.

This will also unfortunately require some attention from all you users, since a Gmail account is valuable in the criminal world on the Internet since you can use it for all Googles web services like Adwords, Adsense, Gmail and many others. Adwords are already getting targetted for phising attempts and this may increase now .

But I still have to say I really like the idea with OpenID since it's just a pain in the ass to have to register over and over again with the same information. So one solution would be to get one Gmail account for OpenID login at other web sites, and another for your really important stuff like Adwords and Adsense.

Another solution instead of multiple Gmail accounts would be to sign up at an OpenID provider like MyOpenID.com where you can get multiple "identities" with one login. This is good when you on some sites would like to share more information, then on others.

If you would like to add OpenID support in your own WordPress blog it's really easy since there are a few plugins for that already . Just have a look at this post.

About the author
Andreas co-founded Xavier Media® in 1996 and has since been involved in all kinds of development, marketing and making money online.