I am a bit late on this, but it is definitely gold. Wordpress.com has pushed OpenID among the masses by enabling them to use URL of their Wordpress.com blog as an OpenID. What this means is that the Wordpress.com bloggers, about 750,000 at the time of this writing, are now OpenID enabled. They can use many services without having to remember any more username/password combinations. Wordpress.com is acting as an OpenID provider, which has brought so many candidates, along with the AOL ones, into the market. Now if OpenID gets more popular with the services, it can really help make it mainstream.
Wordpress.com offer might not be lucrative to the ones who already have one. Maybe Wordpress.com should also allow existing OpenID users to use their OpenIDs. But the ones who do not have one can claim the benefit. Of course, it is not perfect yet, but nothing is, unless everyone in the ecosystem starts contributing to or using it.
January 17th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
[...] have brought the limelight on OpenID by providing it. Then there are other popular services like WordPress.com that let the bloggers use their blog URL as an [...]