Digital Biographer™

A formal announcement has been made today that Yahoo!, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM will all join the OpenID Foundation as Board Members.

What exactly is OpenID? The way they put it at MyOpenID, which is one of many OpenID providers, is simple and compelling: “Start using the last username and password you’ll ever need. Signing up with myOpenID gets you:

• Secure control of your digital identity
• Easy sign-in on enabled sites
• Account activity reports
• Ability to manage multiple personas for different sites, and a whole lot more!”

I think we all find it very useful to be able to just need to remember one sign-in for many different web sites - and it’s also useful to be able to control the level of information and detail that people can see associated with a ‘persona’ - I can choose to have different information and types of information available for my different social and business ‘personas’. It also means that you can more easily update your details, and not worry that dozens of different sites have what might be out-of-date information.

Yahoo enabled openID a few weeks ago, as reported at TheNextWeb Blog, and with this announcement, OpenID seems to be close to becoming the global industry standard for online identity, where a single sign-on will allow access to entirely separate resources, and it should also increase the security of one’s personal identity, and lessen the scope for phishing and ID theft. The OpenID announcement is rightfully bullish about the progress thats been made.

Last year, OpenID grew by leaps and bounds both as a technology and as a community. At the beginning of 2006, there were fewer than 20-million OpenID enabled URLs and less than 500 websites where they could be used. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.

At the same time, they also acknolwedge that although Yahoo!’s implentation was a good start, there is still a job to do to make OpenID “clear and comprehensible to those who aren’t geeks.”

So, is OpenID clear?

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