Jay added OpenID to CrowdVine two weeks ago. I’d wanted to hold off until the libraries and UI kinks got worked out. But when we noticed that Simon Willison, one of the FOWA conference chairs, is an OpenID fan we decided we better include it as a feature of the FOWA CrowdVine.

It was a pleasantly surprising experience.

• Jay used the open_id_authentication plugin and Ben Curtis’ Rails, OpenID, and Acts as Authenticated tutorial. It was just a couple hours of work including research.
• We stole the 37Signals UI patterns of toggled OpenID fields. The link is visible enough to people who want to use OpenID but not so confusing to people who’ve never heard of it. Thanks 37Signals (and also for Campfire, Basecamp, and Highrise which we also use).
• 7% of our new users are using OpenID. That’s a lot higher than I expected (although our users are pretty tech-oriented).