Nice post, enjoyed reading, and I totally agree with your opinion about OpenID’s usability.

But I feel that it’s 100% normal, that we’re at this stage of the adoption process. After all, 15 years ago when most people didn’t have or knew their email address. Now most people have many. Though it might well stop there and never go further, like Gopher (there’s a small community still using it, but my dad ain’t part of it).

There’s a few big providers giving them along with their other services, such as AOL, Yahoo, and Flickr. Other big providers (Microsoft? MSN? Facebook? Apple?) might follow. There might be an OS integration at some point. More and more regular guys will have OpenIDs. So more and more sites and web apps might allow OpenID logins. And, hopefully, more and more people will use it, and it’ll become “main stream”. Or it’ll fail along the way.

But the thing is, the more regular guys that use it, the more non-tech exposure it gets, and the more user friendly it will become. Because tech savvy users are usually really bad at designing things for the regular guys.

Just like the email, which started with ugly complicated clients with tons of fields (my mom doesn’t care about BCC or incoming mail headers) to end up with the easy to use Thunderbird.

After all, isn’t OpenID a huge revolution? It takes time to change people’s habits.