Today's Internet still has some problems. One of them is that there are too many passwords to remember.
You know the story: a new web site interests you but you have to spend some minutes creating a new account and, what is more, you will have to remember a new login and password
Being a bit simplistic, I would say that there may be two ways of resolving this problem:
1) The password manager
A password manager organizes your login names and passwords for different sites and is intelligent enough to provide the right credentials to each site.
The user has to store all his passwords online. You have to convince the user that you are trustworthy enough. The user may be reluctant to afford the risk of being impersonated. Another problem is that this method does not eliminate the need of having to spend some minutes creating a new account in each site.
There are quite a lot of downloadable password managers. There are also some online ones like clipperz.com, myopenid.com, and passpack.com
2) The third party universal login provider
This approach is much more ambitious. Basically the idea consists in creating a third party "login & password" provider and convince web companies to take you as a reference for user authentication and accept your login names in their web sites. This means one single login & password for every site that supports it.
The tough part of this is that you really have to convince other web companies to modify their sites to support your universal login. Another problem is that you not only have to provide the login service but, what is more, trust services
The players:
- Microsoft tried to do this with Passport years ago and many websites including eBay tried it out. But it didn't work out.
- Typekey from SixAppart is a similar system there still isn't widespread adoption.
- OpenID is by far the winner of the game: early in 2007, OpenID convinced Digg to adopt their authentication system. Microsoft and AOL announced their support, as well.
- One of the reasons of this success may be that, unlike Microsoft Passport and Typekey, OpenID, for better or for worse, is a decentralized system.
More information on Techcrunch, on Shoemoney and on Simplespark
