In a nutshell, OpenID lets you take your identity with you, proving to other sites on the web that you own a particular URL. LiveJournal's OpenID support lets you use your LiveJournal identity (just your URL) on other websites which take OpenID, and also lets you take your non-LiveJournal identity and use it here.

DMV says:

Any chance Memestreams would climb onboard?

Yes. I've wanted to see something like this for quite some time. This sounds very similar to the sort of system I've envisioned. However, I need to read the spec in detail and see if this was implemented properly.

Questions:
1. How is the security of this? I need to read more and consider it.

2. FOAF sucks. How does the new site actually get meaningful bio information about me when I create my account using this system? This seems like a more important problem to solve. We've been thinking of making a bunch of extensions to foaf here, but we've got a lot of other work to do.

3. Email verification. Will LiveJournal validate that they have verified the users email address? Can I trust them?

news: OpenID support