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What percentage of non-techies has even heard of OpenID?

What is important to the computer world is different from what most of the rest of the world values.

For me, the ultimate answer would depend on how computer-savvy my intended audience is and how much extra effort is necessary to support it.

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You could have said the exact same thing about, say, the Internet 20 years ago.

I'm not claiming OpenID is as important as the internet, but just because average people don't know about it doesn't mean its not important or won't be important in the future.

There's a way to fix this, but it isn't widely known yet. Using browser history sniffing[1] you can determine which popular IDP the user uses (let's say AOL) and then you can customize your login box to say "log in using your AOL screen name". So you're doing OpenID, but the user doesn't have to know what OpenID is. This is a little cumbersome to implement; maybe somebody will write a JS library to do it.

[1] which will probably be removed from browsers at some point, but let's exploit it while it lasts

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