Thanks to a terrific service called RPX from JanRain, I’ve rewritten all of the code on SpokenWord.org for third-party identity providers. In addition to OpenID and Facebook, you can now use the following to login to the site: Google, Yahoo!, WordPress, Windows Live, Blogger, Flickr, AOL and Live Journal. Whereas I previously spent many days (each) to implement raw OpenID and Facebook Connect, getting the basic mechanism of RPX up and running takes only about two hours. And most of that is just waiting for a CNAME to appear in DNS. When you’re done, you instantly have access to a whole slew of third-party ID providers. I did spend a few more days to write about 800 lines of code — yeah, most of it was re-purposed — to fully integrate RPX into our existing identity system. But that’s only required if you need to allow users to link to their existing logins and you don’t want to use JanRain’s simplified identity-mapping service. And now, as JanRain adds more features and identity providers to RPX, we get them with no development/integration effort at all.