Now that Twitter is my latest obsession, and I'm experimenting with ideas for how it can be used by the nonprofit technology community, it's becoming clear that we need something like OpenID in the mix.
Having already spent plenty of time identifying my friends and colleagues on a widget such as MyBlogLog, I don't want to repeat the whole exercise with Twitter. Fortunately, a lot of folks use the same login names and images to identify themselves in both environments (and Change.Org, and Social Source Commons, and the N-TEN affinity groups, and...). However, it's still time-consuming to keep running the same searches every time it try a new online tool. Isn't the whole point of computing to use a machine to do the repetitive tasks, and free us up to do what only humans can do?
This looks like a great moment to add OpenID to the nonprofit technology widget mash-up. As Kaliya Hamlin has so eloquently pointed out, we need a powerful and flexible tool for identity management across multiple online communities, so that it's not so arduous to create a login and find our crew, when we explore the latest cool tool.
As I started writing this blog article, I received an email from my buddy Marshall Kirkpatrick of SplashCast Media, as part of an ongoing discussion about how much effort it requires to add a comment to this blog. Ever since I received Michelle Murrain's sensible feedback about this, it's been on my mind. I changed the comment settings a week ago to allow for anonymous comments and remove the requirement that commenters go through an anti-spam test - but when I checked just now, Blogware still hadn't updated the settings. Meanwhile, in his latest email to me, Marshall pointed out that it would all be easier if BlogWare supported OpenID, but at this point it doesn't.
So what's next? Do we start an email campaign, advocating that the various widgetmeisters add OpenID capability? Do we enlist the OpenID team? (I'd like to do the latter, but for some reason, their web site doesn't include any contact information.) Is there something better than OpenID that the nonprofit techies can adopt? We need to figure this out.
