How about standard applications? WordPress has a (yet incomplete) plugin, I’m on phpBB, and while working on the phpbb-openid site I also polished the Drupal 5 module. I’ve recently blogged about those.

Now, another project of mine involves a different sort of intermediary. I can’t currently disclose much details. It would still require the application to have OpenID support, but will hopefully make the users even more happy…

As for the .name domain, I wouldn’t regret it that much. Who’d want one anyway?

To answer your question, it seems to me that one of the main reasons there’s such a lack of OpenID consumers is that it’s just not easy to adopt. You have to integrate an OpenID library into your app, alter your user DB to accommodate URL in place of username/password, and then deal with issues like linking OpenIDs to old accounts, letting users change their OpenID URL, etc.

This might not seem like a big deal to you, but I think it’s a lot to ask of a site just to ease logins — after all, that effort will be competing with the usual pressure to work on features and bugs in the app itself. That’s why I propose that for apps without high security requirements, that an intermediary deal with OpenID auth for the site and then translate it to the usual username/password.

Btw, I just saw your description of FreeYourID as “a lot like smoking: it’s bad for you, it costs you money, and you can’t quit.” Hah. I previously signed up and immediately regretted it when I realized I’d just forfeited marsh.name…

Now, to my question. What integration issues?