New feature: OpenID commenting
Blogger in Draft now lets you enable OpenID-based commenting, in your blogs' Settings | Comments tab: — (OpenID comments work in both the Anyone and Registered Users modes) — This means that users of OpenID-enabled services — such as LiveJournal and WordPress …
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands a month after Disqus launched a standalone blog-commenting app built around portable identities, and months after WordPress.com adopted OpenID back in March — meaning every major move in comments this year has been about letting readers carry one identity across blogs rather than registering per-site. With Nielsen reporting in mid-November that WordPress-hosted sites had overtaken SixApart's TypePad as the No. 2 most-visited blog host, Google's Blogger is responding by accepting those rival networks' users as commenters.
First-order effects
- Readers of LiveJournal- and WordPress-enabled OpenID accounts can now comment on any Blogger blog that flips the setting in its Settings | Comments tab, working in both Anyone and Registered Users modes — no separate Blogger registration required.
- Blog owners gain a spam-and-friction lever: they can require an existing external identity before a comment posts, filtering anonymous drive-bys without walling off rival-platform audiences.
Second-order effects
- Disqus's pitch — one login, many blogs — is partially commoditized when the largest hosting platform bakes federated identity into native commenting, forcing third-party comment layers to compete on moderation and threading features instead of single sign-on.
- LiveJournal gets a reputational offset: after the mid-2007 [[a:/entity/livejournal|mass deletion revolt]] drove users away, OpenID lets those exiles keep their LiveJournal identity alive across Google's network even where they no longer post.
Third-order effects
- If Google-scale platforms keep accepting OpenID, decentralized identity shifts from enthusiast protocol to default infrastructure for UGC — though the analyst criticism from August 2007 that OpenID's consumer signup remains bewildering suggests mainstream adoption hinges on providers hiding the URL mechanics entirely.
The trend: Blog commenting is consolidating around federated identity, with each major host converting OpenID support from differentiator into expected plumbing.