Authenticate anyware

There is new Flickr-type site making the beta rounds, called Zooomr. I found it via Dystopics review.

I normally could care less about a new photo-site, but there is one feature that I'm just crazy about: distributed authentication.

See the screenshot from their login page (taken from the above review):

You can use Level9, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google and Meetro. OpenID is the cool one, for me, because it also enables you to use your Typekey identity for logging in.

I think this is the second service I see the allows this kind of distributed authentication, the first being LiveJournal and their comment system. But Zooomr takes it to the new level, by using distributed authentication instead of providing a registration step.

You see a lot of people, specially the 37Signals guys, talking about the importance of doing simple registration procedures. This is the next step: no registration at all to start using the service.

Technorati Tags: typekey, google, meetro, livejournal, level9, distributed, openid, authentication