Is 63 million enough?

On my latest Rails project, I’ve planned on implementing OpenID as the authentication system. It’s definitely been picking up steam lately both in the Rails community and the internet in general. The more I think about it, the more I love the idea of somebody else authenticating my users! At the very least, it saves me from writing those “forgot your password?” pages.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the OpenID-friendly sites out there don’t use it as their primary authentication system. Take a look at LiveJournal, Highrise, and Ma.gnolia. Instead, it’s another system that they’ve added on to their existing authentication. I’m guessing that’s because they adopted OpenID well after they had already launched their site. I can understand why these sites wouldn’t want to force their users to migrate their accounts after seeing the debacle that Flickr and Yahoo went through.

However, this has made me start to wonder. Are there really enough OpenID users out there to justify a site that only offers OpenID authentication? Or should I build my own authentication system and then add OpenID as an alternative? To me that seems like twice the work.

Then I saw that AOL has migrated their entire user base to OpenID…all 63 million of them. Understandably, not all of the users are happy to be using OpenID with AOL. But surely 63 million possible users has to be enough to justify using OpenID? It is for me. :)

In the end, I chose to go with OpenID as my sole authentication system. Maybe it’s because I’m lazy (it does save me a ton of work). Maybe it’s because Zooomr has enough faith in OpenID to migrate all of their users away from their own proprietary login system. Maybe it’s just because the biggest software company in the world decided to support it? Or maybe it’s just because my site will probably never get that many hits so what’s the point of worrying? :)