Scott Gilbertson of Wired claims that it’s time for social networks to open up but Armand Duplessis points out that facebook is not to be classed amongst the ‘walled gardens’ of other social networks any longer now that there is an application allowing you to set your facebook identity as your OpenID

Unfortunately I have to disagree with Armand; the walls may be easier to climb but they are still there. Until Facebook allows you to sign up to their service using something like OpenID it is still to be counted amongst the other walled gardens of its social network brethren.

My first encounter with OpenID came from a twittered invitation to Jyte but in order to ‘participate in a claim’ I had to sign in, which meant setting up an OpenID account for myself.

If you read the above link you may initially find (as I did) that your eyes start to glaze over and instead of taking in the information, you’re clicking over to something a little easier on the eye and mind - even folk like web strategist Jeremiah Owyan say that:

it’s not being adopted because it’s too geeky, maybe they need a marketing evangelist, or a mass consumer tool will need to be birthed

The basic idea is that you sign up with an OpenID provider and register your details with them, they then provide you with a url. When you wish to join or comment on a site that has OpenID support, instead of registering all your details all over again, you merely sign in with your OpenID url.
It sounds simple really doesn’t it? So why is it too geeky to catch on? Your guess is as good as mine but it seems to be that anything with the word ‘open’ in it is classed as geeky and therefore only to be used by the ‘elite’ or professional.