Earlier today in Tokyo, the OpenID Foundation along with eleven technology companies in Japan announced the formation of a Japanese chapter of the OpenID Foundation. Just as the OpenID Foundation’s board is made up of some of the top Internet companies around the World, these initial participants in this local chapter are some of the top technology and are the premier social networking services in Japan. The OpenID Foundation works to support the community all around the World and is encouraging the formation of local chapters to work within their own communities, supporting the Foundation’s mission of fostering and promoting the development and adoption of OpenID on the Internet.

In addition to taking part in the Japan chapter, Mixi announced that they will be shipping support for OpenID shortly. The joint Japanese press release garnered enough attention to be featured on the front page of Google News in Japan and the introduction is translated below:

Six Apart KK (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo, Executive Vice President of U.S. Six Apart, Ltd.& General Manager of Japan: Nobuhiro Seki), VeriSign Japan K.K. (Headquarters: Chuo-ku, Tokyo, President & CEO: Teruhide Hashimoto) and Nomura Research Institute, Ltd. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President, CEO&COO: Akihisa Fujinuma) announced today that the three companies will jointly establish “OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter (tentative name)” in order to further popularize OpenID technologies in Japan.

OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter will be established in April as Japan’s branch office of the U.S.’s OpenID Foundation under permission of the U.S. parent organization. The three companies, founders of OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter, have held discussions with the U.S.’s OpenID Foundation aimed at establishing the foundation in order to vigorously accelerate popularization of OpenID technologies in Japan. Companies Ascent Networks, E-context, Infoteria, Livedoor, mixi, Nifty, Technorati Japan, and Yahoo! Japan will also participate in OpenID Foundation, Japan Chapter primarily to support implementation and popularization of OpenID technologies for consumers in Japan.

David Recordon (Vice-Chair of the OpenID Foundation) and Nat Sakimura (of NRI) spoke this morning in Tokyo and their presentation can be found online. If you’re already building an OpenID community and wish to start a local chapter of the Foundation, you can learn more at http://openid.net/foundation/chapters/.

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. 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.

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. OpenID has grown to be implemented by major open source projects such as Drupal, cornerstone Web 2.0 services such as those by 37signals and Six Apart, as well as a mix of large companies including as Apple, Google, and Yahoo!. Today is about truly recognizing the accomplishments of the entire OpenID community which has certainly grown beyond the small grassroots community where it started in late 2005.

So what does this really mean? In the past few months respected bloggers, analysts, and marketers have been writing about how OpenID needs to start being explained clearly, so that it can actually become a mainstream technology. We started this process late last year by cleaning up the website, making it far more accessible and useful to a wider range of people. At OpenID DevCamp there was a focus on OpenID usability and the implementation of Yahoo! OpenID Provider clearly shows that a lot of thought went into making it clear and comprehensible to those who aren’t geeks.

One of the other accomplishments of the Foundation last year was working with AOL, Microsoft, VeriSign, Sun, Symantec, and Yahoo! to develop an intellectual property rights policy and process for technical OpenID specification work which was finalized in December. While all of these community accomplishments have been great, each was made possible by the community’s willingness to include the resources of companies alongside the efforts of individual contributors.

By bringing on these companies and their resources, the OpenID Foundation will now be able to better serve the needs of  the entire OpenID community. In 2008, we can expect to see a larger focus on making OpenID even more accessible to a mainstream audience, the development of a World-wide trademark usage policy (much like the Jabber Foundation and Mozilla have done), and a larger international focus on working with the OpenID communities in Asia and Europe. Awesome!