OpenID
I've been playing around with OpenID a bit tonight. It started off as a rant about a lack of standards from LiveJournal for a way to access protected or friends-only posts as someone who doesn't actually want a LiveJournal account. It was at that point that I stumbled upon some new features that LJ is adding for OpenID only accounts. Once logged in with an OpenID account you can read protected friend posts and the like. I'll have to see what can be done with the RSS reader that I use.