Sometimes OpenID and discussions about it seem so serious, sometimes academic, and sometimes even stupid. Where is the fun? A more casual app for playing around with? Well, if you like beer, it exists: 97 Bottles.

97 Bottles is only dealing with beer. Users can write reviews about their favourite beers, connect with their friends, and even learn more about beer along the way. But what’s so interesting about 97 Bottles that we feature it here, you might ask? Well, 97 Bottles is a relying party, so new users can simply log in to it with their OpenID and create a new account. Users can also create an acocunt by logging in with a username and password. But why should people do that when having an OpenID?

After logging in users can associate the OpenID with an exisiting account or create a new one. It is really good practice that relying parties allow users to associate an OpenID to an existing account later on. Unfortunately, some services don’t do this which is rather frustrating.

As you can see I don’t need to enter my email address and username anymore because 97 Bottles asked for it during authentication and got that data from my OpenID Provider. Of course, the site also features user profiles and unfortunately, the user experience could be better here. Below are screenshots from the profile form:

Most of those form fields could be filled with data from my OpenID Provider (via the Simple Registration extension, or see our Technical Terms). I don’t know why 97 Bottles doesn’t make use of that data. It’s really unnecessary to ask for it.

Though apart from full support for the Simple Registration extension, 97 Bottles is a nice little site which is a lot of fun. Also for the more tech-savvy users, 97 Bottles supports the hCard microformat – hReview would be nice as well, though, but it’s still in beta, so that might change – and makes it easy to find people’s Twitter friends.

Check it out if you like beer!