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Some may have heard of this, but I suspect many wouldn’t have, and I didn’t know about it until I found that I could login to my YouTube account with my Google ID.

Put simply, you register for an Open ID account , and then you can access sites like Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Live and many more with just the one username and password – much easier than having separate account access at each site.

You can get an Open ID from any provider listed here http://openid.net/get-an-openid , and with a central Open ID profile you can also link all your sites, as well as search friends/contacts from all your Social Networking sites and much more *.

As for security, I don’t think all the ‘big guns’ of the Internet would use it unless they knew it was a secure service; in fact many of them are sponsors of the Open ID Foundation, as well as having representatives on the Board of Directors; so it seems relatively secure in maintaining some of your personal information.

* the above is purely my summation of the Open ID service, please check with individual Open ID providers for exact usage,  features and benefits available.