Emailtoid, the latest innovation from the folks at Vidoop, could be a step toward making OpenID more digestible for the general populous. Its purpose is very simple: allow people to use their email address as an OpenID identity.
To date, OpenID identities have been based on a url. Which is fine for the tech scene, but what about those folks who don't deal with urls on a regular basis? Not so good.
One of the criticisms of OpenID's usability is the reliance on URLs for identifiers since people seem more comfortable identifying themselves by their email address. To remedy this problem, emailtoid was established to offer a simple but robust means for turning email addresses into fully qualified OpenID URLs.
It will be interesting to see if this slight adjustment changes the adoption for OpenID, once OpenID sites implement Emailtoid for their users.
