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THE move towards making portable web identities has taken a giant step forward as five of the industry’s most power companies – Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo – joined the OpenID Foundation board.
The companies were appointed as the Foundation’s first corporate members of the board. In its community blog, OpenID said the announcement marked a milestone in the maturity and impact of the organization.
It was quick to add, however, that the corporate membership of the board did not mean the companies could dictate technical terms.
“While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building,” the OpenID blog said.
Last year, OpenID grew substantially, 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 more than 250 million OpenIDs and well more than 10,000 websites to accept them.
The OpenID Foundation was formed in June 2007 to support and promote the technology developed by the OpenID community. Members include individuals, students, nonprofits, startups and industry giants that have come together to develop and promote open identity management on the Web.
OpenID is free technology that simplifies the online user experience by eliminating the need for multiple user names across Internet sites, enabling individuals to take more control and ownership of their digital identities.
This user-centric digital identity technology helps users reduce the pain of managing dozens, even hundreds, of user names and passwords, and gives users more control over what personal information they share with Web sites when they sign in using an OpenID.
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