Most of the top destination sites (Google, Microsoft and Yahoo included) offer an OpenID account to its users. The problem for users is, how do you know which one to use? ID Selector allows users to quickly choose which of their (probably) many OpenID accounts.
Click the ID Selector button and get a pulldown of some of the most popular OpenID providers. Select the one you want to use, submit and you’re logged in. The ID Selector site has a list of sites currently using the widget including sites like Stack Overflow and Buzzillions.
To developers, ID Selector is a JavaScript widget you can install on your OpenID enabled site. After a brief sign-in process (OpenID, of course), you give ID Selector your domain and it gives you about three lines of HTML to embed in your page. The widget is hosted remotely on ID Selector’s page, as described in ID Selector’s walkthrough video, it offers a much better user experience than most OpenID sites.
There have been plenty of studies to suggest OpenID has an inconsistent and just plain confusing user interface. There have been many attempts to fix this problem and IDSelector is probably one of the better attempts so far. Meanwhile, major players in the OpenID group are working on implementing something very much like ID Selector and even more similar to Facebook Connect’s interface.
ID Selector is much like a proof of concept of how OpenID’s interface is going to look in the future, but for now, we have ID Selector to lead the way.
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