Yesterday JanRain, the company running the well-known OpenID Provider MyOpenID.com, published its Relying Party statistics. According to those statistics there were 31,185 unique websites by the end of 2008 which support OpenID as a Relying Party. As you can see from the chart below, adoption of OpenID is growing steadily. Of course, those are only JanRain’s figures but I think they are representative as MyOpenID.com is one of the bigger dedicated OpenID Providers and therefore is able to monitor most Relying Parties.

Some of the bigger new Relying Parties are video sharing site Dailymotion, AOL’s MapQuest and Universal Music’s subsidiary Interscope Records.

It’s interesting to see the different OpenID login screens of those three sites:

Dailymotion

The OpenID login screen is available by a link at the end of the usual registration form. It’s good to see that the benefits of OpenID are mentioned directly at the login screen. Also five different providers are mentioned if users don’t have an OpenID yet.

MapQuest

At MapQuest users have to decide first if they want to login with an AOL screen name or with an OpenID. Then the screen below is displayed where some better known (mostly) dedicated OpenID Providers are pre-selected. On Dailymotion mostly consumer brands are pre-selected:

Interscope Records

Interscope Records utilizes JanRain’s RPX service. RPX allows logins with OpenID, Facebook, MySpace, Yahoo!, AOL and Google accounts. The login screen is directly available from the frontpage and mentions all supported login methods already via the respective logos. The login screen itself looks like this:

Three different Relying Parties, three different approaches to login screens. I think we will see more variations of login screens in 2009 as usability and user experience will become crucial for OpenID.