So I am a proponent of OpenID. While I haven’t been able to influence its use in projects at work (will not happen anytime soon) I have been trying to implement it into a blog cms I am writing to replace the one I am using now (wordpress is popular but lacking imho).  So I fire up my IDE and implement the Zend_OpenId component following these instructions. I head over to yahoo to try enable openid on my account so I can test out the Zend implementation. It’s easy enough to enable but I got this long url as an id and I begin to wonder “do they really expect me to remember this?” you can customize it but you are advised NOT to use your nickname in the customization becaues then your email address and yahoo id becomes obvious. Ok I tried to make up ANOTHER id to use in my custom yahoo open id implementation and it turns out it is already taken (I thought the idea of openId was to make things easier). I really want to get cracking on my testing so I just use the url that was generated. I head over to my test page and plug in the url and to my surprise it fails. I figure I did something wrong so I look over the example and it appears everything is in order. I head over to yahoo and check the url again and yep its correct. I then decide to read the instructions (yes I am a man) and low and behold you have to enter yahoo.com as the id (excuse me for making the logical leap that the url given to me is what should be used to authenticate like other openid producers). I try that in my example and it fails again. So I head over to another open id consumer and test out the yahoo method and it works. Now I am bummed because there seems to be a bug with the Zend component. Still determined I tried my example using the AOL openid and eureka my example works! This could be because of the protocol the consumers used, or totally something else but at the end of the day yahoo’s openid implementation is unintuitive and really didn’t enhance my login experience. With the recent announcement of more big names joining the party, I hope they don’t mangle what I thought was a really good idea.