Us Intrigees have hopped on the OpenID bandwagon. For me personally, becoming involved in the Portland community and companies like Vidoop and JanRain have really opened my eyes to the prospects and work going on with this piece of technology. Most of the conversations I hear about OpenID revolve around usability, including our own Nathan Bell’s thoughts on putting OpenID in the browser. However, I myself am not a tech guy, and see a bigger issue with adoption that needs to be addressed by those of us in the believer catagory, making it relevant to the majority of users.

The true promise of OpenID, in my opinion, is not just the ability to have a uniform sign-in, it’s the things that you can do once you have a unified sign-in. We often neglect what the web is and always has been, an avenue for communication. Every killer app that we use online, is killer because of it’s ability to improve our communication. Portable social graphs, ease of connections, and reputation building are examples features that greatly enhance the usability of almost any application, and are really only possible once a user owns their online identity. However, much of the benefits of the features comes once users switch to OpenID as their primary authentication process.

So while much focus has been placed on making OpenID more usable, I don’t think we as application developers have leveraged the capabilities of the technology to make it more used. The majority of internet users simply do not have enough accounts or frequented applications to have the legitimate need to unify their sign-ins. While they may think it’s cool, it’s not a huge obstacle to remember 10 usernames and passwords. But once we start making applications that leverage the power of a consistent identity, is when even the average user will begin to say, I need to switch to OpenID, or unify my online identity.

In my opinion, I say we stop working on ways to make OpenID work better, but focus on more ways to make it work for us better. Then we can get the technology to move forward.

Thoughts?