At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of.
With a community of nine million sites that use OpenID logins and one billion enabled accounts, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it’s not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID’s praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too.
OpenID accounts are enabled by such providers as AOL, Blogger, Flickr, Google, LiveJournal, MySpace, Verisign, WordPress and Yahoo, with announcements of upcoming OpenIDs from Microsoft and PayPal. Sites that allow users to login with OpenID range from major retailers and music labels to news organizations and social sites.
As for the government, at the Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington, D.C., earlier this year, the General Services Administration and several government agencies announced they would adopt OpenID as part of the White House’s Open Government Initiative. Participating companies included Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems. On the government side is the Center for Information Technology, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and related agencies.
Not only is the government’s involvement a vote of confidence for OpenID’s innovation, it also speaks to the product’s security progress, which was spearheaded by security committee head and PayPal exec Andrew Nash.
In addition to developing and spreading the OpenID product, there’s also the OpenID Foundation, which appointed its first executive committee, including Chris Messina and Don Thibeau, in 2009.
Portable identity is one of our favorite themes from this year, and we applaud what OpenID has been able to accomplish. What do you look forward to seeing from the product, the foundation and OpenID partner sites in the year to come? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Update: The title of this post was changed to reflect the discrepancy between the number of OpenID enabled accounts now online vs. the number of probable OpenID users.
