Major vendors join OpenID board

IBM, Google,
Microsoft, Verisign
and Yahoo have joined the
corporate board of the OpenID Foundation,
giving a boost to the group's efforts to simplify the process of signing into
Web sites.

The OpenID framework allows people to use a single user name and password to
sign into sites that support it.

More than 10,000 Web sites now support OpenID log-ins, according to the foundation.
Last month, Yahoo announced its 248 million active registered users could begin
using their handle and password to login to non-Yahoo Web sites that support
the OpenID 2.0 framework.

The closer links between OpenID and these major vendors is sure to help the
foundation's effort, according to its executive director, Bill Washburn. "The
community has clearly expanded since the inception of the Foundation and these
companies will help bring OpenID into the mainstream markets," he said
in a statement.

Another statement on the foundation's Web site went into further detail on
what the new alliances could mean.

"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," it read.

"We think this is one of the largest efforts put into identity management
as far as the Internet is concerned," said Anthony Nadalin, an IBM distinguished
engineer and chief security architect for Tivoli software, in an interview Thursday.

Nadalin couldn't pinpoint when the vendors' new level of involvement with OpenID
will produce tangible results. "This takes a little bit of time, understanding
and agreeing on the issues and where we need to drive this set of technology,"
he said.

"IBM is well-known for its ability to produce secure protocols,"
he added. "We have quite a bit of talent to bring to this foundation."

He noted that Version 2.0 of the OpenID framework is still fairly new.

"You can't confuse the industry by coming in and throwing out a brand-new
framework," Nadalin said, "I think it's coming down to that on the
2.0 level, we get the kind of interoperability we need."

Beyond sign-on, various efforts are underway to standardize how personal data
can be moved around the Web. The Dataportability
Workgroup wants to broaden the scope of portable data to things like user-created
photos and videos.

IDG News Service

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