Internet greatest’s join up with OpenID

Written on 7th February 2008                                                                                                              4 COMMENTS
Chris Obdam, Internet entrepreneur

Today Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as board members. The OpenID Foundation board is there to “to help promote, protect and enable the OpenID technologies and community”. OpenID is really exploding in the last couple of months. With Google and Yahoo! becoming official OpenID providers, the OpenID movement has grown to billions of users. Now the Big Five have announced to not only support OpenID as a provider but also actively help to develop the standard furthermore.

Earlier this year OpenID 2.0 has been released. This is a serious landmark in removing the burdon for web users to store loads of password and username combinations. Today there are over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.

In Europe the OpenID Europe Foundation is gathering more and more local OpenID providers to team up. Snorri Giorgetti, founder of the OpenID Europe Foundation, says Europe now contains 17 OpenID providers, varying from France to Estonia. The European Foundation is not directly connected to the OpenID foundation but is there to promote OpenID in the member countries and to support the OpenID consumer websites on a technical level.