Eventually OpenID will likely disappear from the web, not because it was a failure, but because identity will be managed in other ways. Mozilla is hard at work putting identity in the browser. It’s not hard to envision Firefox managing your OpenID credentials for you, just as it does today with your passwords. In that sense OpenID may end up like RSS (another tool routinely declared dead), invisibly powering features behind the scenes, essential, but unnoticed. Eventually online identity may even come full circle and move back into the real world — chips in your phone, tokens that generate random codes or biometric devices.