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.
Why is Yahoo! on this list? they started a week ago with their openID open beta… Anyway this is great news for many users and since the costs are so low to implement, webmasters will love this too.
there is a comprehensive list of openID providers here:
http://wiki.openid.net/OpenIDServers
Just testing our own OpenID implementation here. I upgraded this blog to allow you to use OpenID to login too. Not much benefit to the user except that your comment will be auto approved and we will trust you even more…
@edial Yahoo! is on this list because they have joined the OpenID Foundation board, not because they are creating a OpenID server… :-)
aah! thanks for pointing that out!