It's a shame that big sites are making a distinction between “our users” and “that OpenID scum”. You have to start somewhere though, I guess.

All of the benefits of a “real” user can be replicated by simply replacing the “Password”/“Confirm Password” step in the registration process with “OpenID Identifier”. Even if you don't want to go that far, there's no reason why you can't make an OpenID user go through a CAPTCHA step the first time you encounter a particular identifier.

After whatever hoops you want to make them jump through on the first encounter, there's no real reason why you can't consider them to be just as trustworthy as your “real” users.

I really wish LJ would do better in that regard. I want to be able to attach my n OpenID identifiers to my main LJ account.

The main problem, I guess, is UI. I think the first step would be separating the following concepts:

• Account has journal
• Account's journal is updated manually or via synsuck from a particular URL
• Account has password vs. using OpenID vs. no login at all

Right now, these things are all lumped together in the journaltype field, which can either be “P” for (has journal, updated manually, has password), “Y” for (has journal, uses synsuck, no login at all) or “I” (no journal, n/a, uses OpenID).

With these things separated out, I could have an account with the currently-impossible tuple (has journal, updated manually, uses OpenID). Obviously as well as the OpenID identifier it would need to have a “journal name”, which is what we currently call the username. If I didn't have a journal, I wouldn't necessarily need one. Ideally, I'd be able to choose whether to be identified on the site by my journal name or one of my associated OpenID identifiers.

I expect that this sort of thing is all a way off on any site, though. ;)

In Second Life's case, the impression I've got is that users would find it very useful if they were to run an identity server representing their oddly-named users because users tend to use their SL identity on other SL-related sites. I've been told by my friends that use SL that it's a reasonably frequent request but the SL dev guys haven't acted on it, yet. It's a shame, because it'd probably be pretty easy for them to do given that they already have all the web infrastructure in place as far as I can tell.