Mac or Windows: Open ID anyone?

Wouldn't it be easier if say I had a centralised login area and one password to access all my online services.

Phone numbers, car license, passport id, birthdays, phew... too many things to remember. I personally have in memory some 20 unique multi-character passwords. But that means I easily forget birthdays and phone numbers. It's a skill as some would say, but I live online and skill has hardly anything to do with it. To make matters worse every site has a different password setup. Some will manage with a alphabet based password, while others prefer an alphanumeric arrangement. The credit card and net banking guys have their own rules as well.

Wouldn't it be easier if say I had a centralised login area and one password to access all my online services - Orkut, MySpace and Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay, Flickr and Picasa, and a host of websites that offer me services like web hosting, domain name management, tutorials, and blog trackers?

OpenID is as close to such a solution. This is a decentralised system, but the fundamentals are clear. You create an identity and using this identity log into another system without being registered there. That way, you dont need to join a blog just because you want to post a comment at the blog. You'll probably never use the blog later again.

OpenID is not ideal, but it can be. We all share domain name information with the help of DNS (Domain Name Servers). Can't this concept be applied to Identity based system as well. The world governments already has centralised government databases with information about you. Cannot this framework be extended to include an online identity?

Privacy is always a question, but as I've mentioned before, it is manageable. Transferring login data securely is already managed quite effectively. The storage is just another mechanism. Follow the DNS system and it is already there.

As part of the online system, a centralised framework of identity is paramount and beneficial. Can we progress to this. It would save me a few headaches?