Nik Cubrilovic, the CEO and founder of Omnidrive and I totally agree. OpenID, the new format for logging into many popular websites has a problem. It already has too many providers. Those on WordPress.com have an OpenID. Did you already have one? Well, now you have two. You don’t need to use the other one, but still, it creates a problem, the same problem we currently have, too many ID’s online.

It turns out that we are solving the multiple identity problem by issuing multiple OpenID’s to everybody – defeats the purpose doesn’t it (many of these services give you an OpenID if you want one or not). Fact is, this isn’t going to work if we don’t have consumers and providers – but it seems that while we have plenty of companies wanting to step up us providers (easy) and have their users use their OpenID’s with other applications, we don’t have enough companies stepping up as consumers of OpenID. We now have 100 million+ OpenID’s with nowhere to go (well, almost). I am not sure what the problem is, but I can only speculate that it is because each of these applications would like to maintain some form of control and/or ownership of the user, and have their users go out into the rest of the web world carrying an OpenID with their name and logo on it. If this is the reason, then it is a crazy reason, because you can still hand off identity management to a third-party provider while knowing who the user is – you just won’t be answering emails about forgotten passwords anymore.

Check out his full post, and let me know what you think about this new OpenID movement.

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