I don’t want to hold your identity

So… news of the day (yesterday actually) is that Facebook is getting on board in the OpenID foundation (this is following the annoucement a while back about Paypal doing the same).
Commenters are beginning to recognize that OpenID is actually gaining more momentum than most would have tought and the adoption that many big online services are showing is helping to build a larger mindshare also among the less geeky users.

One critique that I hear a lot is that the way the bigger players are approaching OpenID, basically turning every one of their accounts into an OpenID for their users is not really helping the open web since it’s like every site giving out an email address everybody can send to but just accepting email from their own email addresses. This is true, but here lies also a great opportunity for the smaller players. If you are a startup you should be happy, as what’s happening may mean that you can have a lot more potential users with an easier path to try out your service (got a google account? no need to signup!).
Ideally one’s identity online should not be tied to a specific service, but more likely each user will have one main service which represents his own main “self” online. That will be the main service they use online, the one they are spending more time on. It may be a Google account or a Facebook one or a Myspace identity or their wordpress.com hosted blog, but we can be almost sure that it will not be your shiny new little service.

It’s a great thing that now most of these “main” identities have become portable (thanks to OpenID and Facebook Connect) that is usable elsewhere, just being able to tap into the great number of people that will already have one of the hub-provided identities

You should start right now to plan and execute to adopt OpenID as a consumer, adding also Facebook Connect in the mix as long as they are separate (hopefully they’ll be interoperable in the future).

I don’t want provide a new identity just to be able to tell who you are, thus I, for sure, will try to do this with the services I’m working on.

P.S. I specially like this quote from Chris Messina I read on the ReadWriteWeb:

user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors