This was a huge complaint I had during the stackoverflow beta. Those that are believers in OpenID are zealots. They won't change their opinions no matter how much the general populace hates on it. They likely are public figures (with URL related to their personas - like a website or blog). In this case OpenIDs work beautifully. It's the rest of us that have trouble.
I currently have 4+ OpenIDs and I can never remember URLs or usernames. It inevitably involves me going to my second gmail account and searching for OpenID. Then I choose randomly one of the OpenIDs that show up in the search and use it. That or I end up creating yet another OpenID. So now I spend my time managing OpenIDs instead of user accounts. To me an even bigger waste of time. Meta-account management. And god forbid you start forwarding or attaching one OpenID to another one... that'll REALLY hose things with whichever account you are logging in as. Sites rarely allow the user to tie all those IDs together to a single account - which would at least simplify things a bit. To me this is wayyyy too complicated for average end users. Maybe if it were designed into everyone's web-email accounts and things could be managed there. I've attempted using the Yahoo OpenID and always run into problems with that too.
When I've asked my tech-savvy non-developer friends - none of them even know what it is. I've rarely heard positive feedback outside of people in the tech industry. But then again I haven't gone looking for it.
The compromise between being decentralized and centralized in my opinion is what causes so many problems. There is no one place to go get an openid (try explaining that to the average user). There is no standardized way to get one (every third party site is a little different). And it adds an extra level of indirection - with no perceived benefits to the end user. There are a lot of benefits but none that the end user readily cares about.
I'm not surprised it isn't working so well for you, in that case.
I think some of the centralization/privacy concerns related to OpenID sound like valid points to debate and discuss.
But saying you have too many OpenIDs and that managing them has become a pain is like complaining that you can't remember which of the four wallets you're carrying has your credit card in it, and concluding that wallets suck.
Ya I agree that is one of the problems. But since it's so decentralized and just finding your existing OpenID account can be difficult - it is still a problem. Part of the problem was having multiple emails and multiple types of OpenIDs (Work, Coding and Personal). Add to that - switching web email accounts midway through - and I ended up with multiple accounts.
If I could cut back to just one or two accounts I would. But I've found the management tools lacking both on the client website and OpenID side of things.
I was part of the anti-OpenID movement on StackOverflow. Our complaints, unfortunately, fell upon deaf ears. Fortunately I have my own domain so I decided to be my own OpenID provider with phpMyID, but I don't plan to use it for anything else besides StackOverflow. It's just not worth the hassle.
This was a huge complaint I had during the stackoverflow beta. Those that are believers in OpenID are zealots. They won't change their opinions no matter how much the general populace hates on it. They likely are public figures (with URL related to their personas - like a website or blog). In this case OpenIDs work beautifully. It's the rest of us that have trouble.
I currently have 4+ OpenIDs and I can never remember URLs or usernames. It inevitably involves me going to my second gmail account and searching for OpenID. Then I choose randomly one of the OpenIDs that show up in the search and use it. That or I end up creating yet another OpenID. So now I spend my time managing OpenIDs instead of user accounts. To me an even bigger waste of time. Meta-account management. And god forbid you start forwarding or attaching one OpenID to another one... that'll REALLY hose things with whichever account you are logging in as. Sites rarely allow the user to tie all those IDs together to a single account - which would at least simplify things a bit. To me this is wayyyy too complicated for average end users. Maybe if it were designed into everyone's web-email accounts and things could be managed there. I've attempted using the Yahoo OpenID and always run into problems with that too.
When I've asked my tech-savvy non-developer friends - none of them even know what it is. I've rarely heard positive feedback outside of people in the tech industry. But then again I haven't gone looking for it.
The compromise between being decentralized and centralized in my opinion is what causes so many problems. There is no one place to go get an openid (try explaining that to the average user). There is no standardized way to get one (every third party site is a little different). And it adds an extra level of indirection - with no perceived benefits to the end user. There are a lot of benefits but none that the end user readily cares about.
An interesting article on OpenID from Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001121.html
I attempted to find the uservoice thread about OpenID in stackoverflow but it's been deleted: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.685860....