The Future of Logins

So I often say "wow, how did people survive before *insert modern amenity*". Today I re-discovered openid and then facebook connect, two services which seek to give you one online presence but access to multiple sites. In theory this sounds fantastic but immediately a problem arises: I already have a login for most of the major sites I use. Then after checking the list of sites compatible with both services I let out a sigh and gave up on the idea. Essentially these services are useless, for all the google services I use I have one login and that works well xyz@gmail.com gets me into blogger, gmail, docs etc. and connects the majority of these services to my G1. If the whole web worked like that would a place it would be; rather than signing up for a drop box account I simply add dropbox to my list of services and off I go. In 5yrs I hope I can look back and ask how I lived with having to remember 20 passwords! I came out of hibernation just to say this and Happy New Year.

Update: 28-Feb-2021

So about 12 years later, my despair was misplaced. Lots of sites support logging in with Google, Facebook etc. now and it's better than I hoped because many of those services support 2FA. The password management space is also a lot better and with options like Fido2 maybe I'll be back in another 10+ years to say I don't even use passwords anymore! For now though I have upwards of 200 passwords but I know it could be a little worse without being able to use OpenID.