Wish I had replied to this sooner!

I agree with what you say.

I used openid with http://identi.ca/

Where as a normal userid can be saved by your browser (and by the remember me option on the website). The OpenId version involves several clicks and slow page loads each time I enter the site.

Then, when I wanted to use ping.fm (to send messages to identi.ca) I had to enter my credentials. Of course I couldn’t use OpenID here. I had to use a identi.ca based username/password, which I had never setup. So using OpenID had given me another downside.

Thoughts:
– I can’t remember my URI. (Interestingly the first site I used with it – can’t remember what – did not require a URI, just for me to select my OpenID provider and then redirected to them to enter my credentials. If I could just enter yahoo.com and then my username/password, then that would be better than a URI)

– Needs a ‘remember me’ option.

– I have just tried to log in to connotea.org and crowdvine.com using openid. both are failing with unhelpful error messages. is this a temporary problem, am i doing something wrong? should i be linking my openid to my user account first, is there a fault with my openid provider? I don’t know. but these problems and questions would not exist with traditional authentication.

– it does solve the issue of too many *different* usernames (lack of availability) and different passwords (different stupid rules). which can end up with unlimited different username/password combinations to try.

– perhaps one area this is useful is discussion forums and commenting on media sites (BBC have your say, thesun etc), and blogging sites for commenting. I’ve signed up for loads of forums (phpBB etc) for one off asking questions, probably never to use the forum again, i.e. when looking at purchasing something in particular (such a broadband). OpenID seems like a good solution to these forums which you want to use to get an answer to something but don’t really want to go through a full signup process.

– I don’t agree that non-geeks don’t need this. Obviously everyone is different, but I know people who use youtube, flickr, perhaps del.icio.us, and a few other sites (see forums), and they must be getting sick of different usernames, different passwords (different password rules) etc.