One account to manage all your logins is a great concept. It's when you look at the potential beyond just logins is what begins to make OpenID very cool! You want to talk about the next greatest thing to the Web since Web 2.0, OpenID is the answer. Global use of avatars or display pictures, autofill of much or most of personal information on sites you visit, and or become members of. Social networking based on OpenID using a system like friend levels to determine what they can see about you, or how they can interact with you or even if people think you are in fact who you say you are.

This is called your online reputation. Your online reputation is a combination of who you say you are, who your friends percive you as, and what strangers thing of you as well. Heres an example...

If Bob claims to be a rocket scientist and is a rocket scientist and is regarded by friends and other people as rocket scientist, then (in that respect) Bob has a good reputation.

So the beauty of this is that this helps to eliminate many forms of identity theft or fraud as we see them on the social networking sites. I sense another Web 2.0ish term coming from this reputation based system. I-Rep maybe? Let's take this a step further, using API's, and OpenID, who's to say the global social networking app is created. Let's face it most of us are members of many tools, not just one. Some friends are on one network, and others are on another. So what if we created a new service called The Global Social Networking Protocol - GSNP (Sounds oddly like a stock name). All this service does is replicate data you enter to all your online persona's. So in a basic example let's say you are a female, and you get married. You then log onto the GSNP to change your last name. This is then replicated out to MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, Hotmail, Gmail, Banana Republic, Ebay, and whatever other accounts your OpenID is associated with.

Maybe you would have all your friends replicated between social networking sites that you use. Better yet, maybe a new Global Social Networking Site springs up that uses data from all the different sites, but merges it together creating one Social Networking super site. More or less a skinned conglomerate of many tools that already exist, we are just making it friendlier. This sounds like an Apple product in the making.

There are more abilities... you might setup a permissions base to allow your friends to see your calendar, photos, blog, contact information among other things. Maybe your closest friends can interact with that data further by commenting, adding appointments to your calendar, or posting new photos to your photo albums.

The point here is that if OpenID can gain the traction necessary it will be the beginnings of some monster applications that manage the way handle our online habits. The possibilities here seem never ending when you bring all these tools, logins, and OpenID together.

If you are still unfamiliar with OpenID I suggest you begin reading up on it and get familiar. OpenID is a one login system to manage multiple identities that most of use have online. Forums, Blogs, Web site Logins, and so on. OpenID uses a trust relationship relying on your personal URL, for example http://wwww.designsbyjohnson.com is my OpenID. Anywhere that I can login using OpenID I simply enter my URL to login. I have to setup a trust relationship once with one or two clicks and never have to log into that site again. Start implementing OpenID into your projects, personal sites etc, and get this awesome tool widely distributed.