Blogger Beta Now Supports OpenID Logins
Google has added OpenID support to the moderated comments feature in Blogger. The new OpenID features are only available through the beta version of the service, known as Blogger in Draft, but Google plans to roll it out on the main site after gathering user feedback.
OpenID, a universal signing mechanism that eliminates the need for multiple, scattered site logins, has been gaining momentum over the past couple of years — already sites like Microsoft, AOL, WordPress, Six Apart and hundreds of others support OpenID in various forms.
The Blogger implementation of OpenID allows for commenters on your site to sign in using any OpenID provider, rather than just signing in via a Blogger account.
To enable the OpenID integration on your Blogger page, you’ll need to head over to the “Draft” site and change the settings for your blog. Look under the Comments tab where you’ll see options on who can comment. Along with the “Anyone” option, which allows anonymous comments, you’ll see the option to allow only “Registered users” which will get OpenID working on your blog.
The OpenID feature will certainly be welcomed by those that only allow registered users to comment since now outside users from services like LiveJournal or Wordpress can comment, but so far Blogger isn’t an OpenID provider which means Blogger users can’t enjoy the same access privileges on other services (unless you’ve setup an OpenID account separately).
Hopefully that’s something Blogger will begin offering in the near future (even better would be if Gmail became an OpenID provider).
The other main shortcoming is that even users signing in with OpenID must still solve a CAPTCHA, which seems unnecessary, though perhaps not since inevitably spammers will find a way to use OpenID logins.
For more details on how to hook yourself up with an OpenID, check out our tutorial.
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