OpenID has gained two more high profile Internet company
supporters. WordPress announced their support today
and also Chris Messina did a bit of snooping and discovered that
37Signals support is nigh. These two organizations join Digg, Microsoft,
AOL, Yahoo,
LiveJournal, MediaWiki, and others in their support of OpenID. There are still gaps –
e.g. even in today’s WordPress announcement, it’s worth noting that you can’t actually
sign into your WordPress blog with an OpenID a/c. But you can (as Chris
Messina explained) use your WordPress.com URL as an OpenID elsewhere, making
WordPress.com an “identity provider”.
Remember our poll, which showed that 52% of respondants either don’t have an OpenID
account or don’t know what it is? Well that’s slowly changing – and every time a new
Internet company supports OpenID, the chances of OpenID becoming the decentralized
identity service of choice increase.
But as Marc Canter recently pointed
out, Sxip is the loser in all this – having once
been the poster child for open identity on the Web. Sxip is still claiming to be “the
market leader in Identity 2.0”
though – and it does seem to have a nice
deal with Google, which just happens to be the only one of the Big 3 not to
have jumped onto the OpenID bandwagon yet…
