How many usernames and passwords do you have? At the last count I had around 50 of them. Yup 50 usernames and passwords that I often use on the world wide web. This is because I am a member of various forums, newsgroups, mailing lists and open source communities on the internet. Its really a pain to remember all so many of these.

The solution I have is to use, say 3 different username/password combinations, and use them. One for all your emails – which has a very strong password, another for online communities, forums and mailing lists – which do not require a very strong password and another miscellenous username/password pair for other low priority stuff.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Rediff, Indiatimes, Apple etc etc provide a restricted “Single Sign On” (SSO) mechanism wherein if you create a username/password once, the same can be utilized for different services like Picasa, Google Docs, Flickr, Yahoo Finance, Orkut etc etc.

Restricted because these usernames are only applicable to Google, Yahoo or MSN services. An ID created with one of the companies cannot be used with another.

OpenID is a solution to this. OpenID allows users to log on to multiple websites using a single ID eliminating the need to have multiple usernames and passwords. OpenID is in the form of a URL, something like, http://aadilkhan.maniyar.myopenid.com (BTW, that is my openID)

All you need to do is get a OpenID from one of the Open Identity Providers like myOpenID, AOL, Yahoo etc and you are done.

Does getting a OpenID free your mind from remembering usernames and passwords, well not right away. You see this is an upcoming technology and the number of websites supporting this is in the thousands (as compared to the millions of websites on the internet). But the support is growing day by day. The latest one to support OpenID is MySpace & Google. With Google, Microsoft & Yahoo showing keen interest in OpenID, there are exciting times ahead.

Google, Yahoo and AOL are just openID providers, this means that you wont be able to log in to these websites using openID. They provide and ID which could be used by openID enabled websites.

Did You Know:

• If you have a blog at WordPress.com you can use it your openID.
• If you have domain name registered, that can serve as an openID.
• If you own a website, you could delegate user authentication to one of the openID service providers.

Find out more about OpenID here and here.

Find a  list of openID enabled websites here.