Less convenient? So, what happens when you're at a friend's house or public computer where you don't have your 1Passwd/Keychain database?
Plus, once you're logged into your OpenID provider, you don't have to enter your password for any sites which you already trust, until you log out. That's part of the advantage of a single sign-on system.
"Sites which don't support HTTPS can hardly be relied upon to be careful with my data, anyway." -- so, the vast majority of sites? People are going to use these sites either way. Most users don't even know what HTTPS is.
While it's unlikely an OpenID provider would sell out to DoubleClick, etc, if you're paranoid it's also very easy to use your personal website URL as a portable OpenID (it's literally two extra HTML tags in your homepage's header). You can either run your own provider using a simple prepackaged solution, or do what I do and just delegate to another provider, which you can easily change in the future with a quick edit of you homepage's header. Here's mine:
There's even WordPress (and I'm sure others) plugins to make this trivial for non-technical users.
I agree OpenID is a little difficult to understand (as evidenced by some of the comments here) but it's actually very easy to set up a simple OpenID (many people already have one and don't know it... all AOL, Technorati, LiveJournal, WordPress, and some other accounts are OpenIDs) and not too much harder to set up a delegated OpenID or run your own provider.
Plus, once you're logged into your OpenID provider, you don't have to enter your password for any sites which you already trust, until you log out. That's part of the advantage of a single sign-on system.
"Sites which don't support HTTPS can hardly be relied upon to be careful with my data, anyway." -- so, the vast majority of sites? People are going to use these sites either way. Most users don't even know what HTTPS is.
While it's unlikely an OpenID provider would sell out to DoubleClick, etc, if you're paranoid it's also very easy to use your personal website URL as a portable OpenID (it's literally two extra HTML tags in your homepage's header). You can either run your own provider using a simple prepackaged solution, or do what I do and just delegate to another provider, which you can easily change in the future with a quick edit of you homepage's header. Here's mine:
There's even WordPress (and I'm sure others) plugins to make this trivial for non-technical users.I agree OpenID is a little difficult to understand (as evidenced by some of the comments here) but it's actually very easy to set up a simple OpenID (many people already have one and don't know it... all AOL, Technorati, LiveJournal, WordPress, and some other accounts are OpenIDs) and not too much harder to set up a delegated OpenID or run your own provider.
Here's a great little article by Sam Ruby: http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-S...
I suggest everyone look into OpenID a little more before completely dismissing it.