OpenID Commenting Comes to Blogger.com

At first, people thought Blogger.com must have gone bonkers. Some even thought the "evilness" of Google PageRank slapfest has taken hold at Blogger.com.

I'm sure WordPress and other non-Blogger users would have noticed the sudden change when they wanted to leave a comment at a Blogger site.

"Hey, WTF, how come I can't leave my blog address here anymore?"

That would be the most likely reactions from readers to this new surprising experience at Blogger sites. I was initially disappointed, too, after reader BlueBeaverBeer brought it to my attention in his comment in my previous post on this blog.

It would be "doomsday for comments" at Blogger sites if that was for real. But after further investigations, it turned out that Blogger.com is using Blogger In Draft to implement this latest feature that's called OpenID Commenting. Blogger In Draft is Blogger.com's experimental version that does "test drives" of new features that are being added to the Blogger platform.

The new OpenID Commenting feature can be activated now and I've done that to this site. (See screen capture below)
















According to Blogger In Draft:

This feature is in Draft because we'd like to hear feedback about the implementation, and to test it further before moving it to Blogger's main site. We're also working on functionality to let Blogger's URLs (both Blog*Spot and custom domains) be used for commenting elsewhere on the web."

With OpenID services enabled, users such as those from WordPress and LiveJournal can now comment on Blogger blogs using their own accounts rather than having to register with Blogger/Google accounts.













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Of course, if you are a Blogger user, you have to activate the OpenID Commenting feature first. And for users of other platforms, they have to acquire their OpenIDs.

What does OpenID do for you? With it, you only have to authenticate yourself once and be able to post comments not only on Blogger sites but also on other platforms without having to show your credential all over again.

The powerful aspects of OpenID is that you can do away with multiple usernames across different websites. Your online experience is simplified. The technology is not proprietary and it's free.

To know more about OpenID, you can head over to OpenID.net for a more comprehensive explanation of this new technology that may well be an industry standard in the near future.