Over the years, as new web services have come into prominence, there’s been a rush to get hold of the best IDs. Most people would chase something resembling their name, with those with popular names too late to the game being left with the lame IDs: nicknames, real name + licence plate number, or hackerz sp34k versions.

Some of the defunct web sites I got good IDs for include Excite and mail.com. Some I still use include Gmail (and all the other Google properties), Hotmail and Yahoo.

With the news that Microsoft will be supporting OpenId, I reckon the next big rush could be for this, particularly if Google and Yahoo are sensible and decide to jump on the bandwagon.

OpenID identifies you by a URL/URI, so it’s marginally less user-friendly than a conventional logon, but if it takes off (*if*) and gets widespread use around the web, from a user point of view, it could go a long way towards cutting down on the zillions of passwords people currently have to remember… and thus have to write them all down.

So I’ve got my OpenID already. Have you? Now, since Flickr are pissing everybody off with new limitations, maybe I’ll go over to Zooomr and take a look around there.