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!
February 7th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[...] Good news, more to follow (I hope) [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
[...] January, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM (I just missed out Microsoft) have all now formally announced they will be joining the OpenID foundation, taking seats as the organization’s first [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
The endorsement of these industry-leading companies indicates that OpenID has reached a tipping point. This is a milestone in the evolution toward a more user-centric internet designed with people in mind. i-names solve the first layer of identity management issues we all deal with every day — issues that were not foreseen back when computers were used only by enterprises. I can’t wait to see what’s next!
February 7th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
[...] 7, 2008 This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have … This is good news, since OpenID is [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
[...] single sign-on for a multitude of sites. Why? Because all of the players involved are happy to join the team, but only Google has taken the extra step of becoming what’s called a “relying [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 4:47 pm
[...] January, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM (I just missed out Microsoft) have all now formally announced they will be joining the OpenID foundation, taking seats as the organization’s first corporate [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
[...] fundación OpenID anunció hoy que se han unido a su junta de miembros corporativos Google, IBM, Microsoft, Verisign, y [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 5:45 pm
The OpenIDDevCamp was indeed fun.
The other day I added a forum to the zentu*nix network, a place for buying and selling of OpenID developer services, for example, to assist both developers and companies or organizations wishing to OpenID enable their sites. Listings are free. Hopefully this might be a little step or two toward bringing awareness that site owners can indeed allow an option for their users who might wish to standardize their online IDs across various websites, for whatever purposes they wish.
February 7th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
[...] דווחנו כי ענקיות התוכנה Microsoft IBM ו- YAHOO ישתפו פעולה מעכשיו עם [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
[...] morning, the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined as its fir…. But don’t worry: OpenID.net was quick to note that the members are not decision-makers: [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Great news, congrats! eagle.MyOpenID
February 7th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
[...] formal announcement has been made today that Yahoo!, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM will all join the OpenID [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
[...] OpenID’s rise continues. [...]
February 7th, 2008 at 11:10 pm
[...] Más información en Openid.net. [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 5:21 am
[...] se não bastassem estes exemplos para demonstrar como a colaboração é boa para os usuários, a fundação OpenID anunciou que Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign e Yahoo! estão unindo forças para promover, apoiar [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 7:29 am
Expansion of the OpenID Foundation…
A short announcement and a huge step for the OpenID movement. Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board of OpenID Foundation. This certainly will expand the use of OpenID. That`s great! I am really happy what happend with OpenI…
February 8th, 2008 at 11:10 am
[...] January, Microsoft, Verisign, Google and IBM (I just missed out Microsoft) have all now formally announced they will be joining the OpenID foundation, taking seats as the organization’s first [...]
February 8th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
I see a big problem these days: there is a “provider race” going on. All these companies want to become the defacto identity provider, but none of them seems to want to accept other providers’ OpenIDs.
This sucks. Maybe the foundation should make it clear to the participants (and everyone else) that OpenId will only fly if all websites ACCEPT openID authentication, and that becoming a provider is not critical.
February 9th, 2008 at 2:23 am
[...] (more on that below), on Tuesday I got a new job and then yesterday we made the long-awaited announcement around Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo! joining the OpenID Foundation board. Add to that [...]
February 9th, 2008 at 4:20 am
I agree with earlier comment. It is important that all these companies who want to become OpenID providers also ACCEPT the OpenID. Unless this happens there is no real benefit to the end user. Companies focused around providing OpenID as a service then can distinguish themselves by providing specific services around identity managment like enhanced security (for example secure cards).
February 9th, 2008 at 5:45 am
Sorry, I don’t see any value in OpenID (yet). I see lots of potential, but that is all.
February 9th, 2008 at 12:52 pm
That a really good news. I hope this trend will push also strong authentication for every body.
We will see.
February 10th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
[...] and really didn’t enhance my login experience. With the recent announcement of more big names joining the party, I hope they don’t mangle what I thought was a really good [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 11:48 pm
[...] is my completely non-technical explanation of OpenID. I felt after all the OpenID buzz last week there was a need for such, seeing that even the BBC wrote a story that focuses on [...]
March 21st, 2008 at 9:43 pm
[...] February Google, IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo and Verisign all demonstrated their support of OpenID by joining the board of the OpenID Foundation. In Europe and Japan there are also strong efforts to [...]
April 7th, 2008 at 5:52 am
[...] there a quarter billion OpenIDs? That would be the conclusion suggested by an announcement from OpenID website two months ago. How many of those users have actually used the OpenID protocol [...]
April 28th, 2008 at 4:47 am
I have removed openid integration from my website temporarly because yahoo is reports CAUTION saying THIS SITE IS NOT VERIFIED. I just does not want to fill fears to my first time visiters at retailspice.com. Can anyone tell me how to avoid this caution notice from YAHOO when user try to login to my website.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:18 am
[...] OpenID is a cool and upcoming technology and has seen significant attention in the past few weeks especially as Yahoo! became an OpenID provider, immediately followed by an announcement that Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, IBM and Verisign had joined the board of the OpenID Foundation. [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 4:14 am
[...] Evolving the OpenID Foundation Board: an announcement that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have all joined the OpenID Foundation as corporate board members. The OpenID foundation began in June of 2007 with the goal of managing the intellectual property and brand marks of OpenID. [...]
January 15th, 2009 at 8:52 pm
[...] to Google, AOL, Yahoo! and more [↩]Barack Obama’s Change.gov Adds OpenID [↩]Evolving the Foundation Board [↩]Supporting OpenID Communities Around the World [↩]OpenID Japan Launches with 32 [...]
March 4th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
vijay: Check out this post: http://blog.nerdbank.net/2008/06/why-yahoo-says-your-openid-site.html
February 14th, 2011 at 12:38 am
The endorsement of these industry-leading companies indicates that OpenID has reached a tipping point.
February 15th, 2011 at 12:59 am
OpenID’s rise continues.
November 17th, 2011 at 3:31 am
[...] OpenID Foundation announced late last week that a handful of technology superpowers have joined the OpenID Foundation's [...]
December 4th, 2011 at 11:30 pm
[...] OpenID announced the entry of some big corps and influential Internet players — Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! — joining them in their effort to have a common and authentic login credential across the Internet. [...]
January 10th, 2012 at 6:23 am
[...] members. If you were concerned about the all those mammoth tech firms weighing in on the spec, the foundation’s announcement says: “Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID [...]