OpenID Gets Much Stronger

Not so long ago, we were talking about Yahoo's plans regarding OpenID, and now, I just found out that a bunch of major IT companies have joined the OpenID Foundation, as board members. Since this gathering is something you don't get to see every day, this topic deserves our undivided attention, because there are exactly five huge companies together, companies that even these days are fighting one another on various battlefields, and it's good to see that OpenID managed to bring them together, somehow...

It's good to see Google, Microsoft and Yahoo together, especially being given the latest events related to them. Apart from the three giants above, the OpenID Foundation announced that IBM and VeriSign have also joined the board. We all must admit it's an impressive evolution, from a foundation started by six community members back in 2006 to this point, but let's see some more numbers now, shall we?

In early 2006, the number of OpenID-enabled URLs was smaller than 20 million, and there were only about 500 websites where people could use them. As we speak, the number of OpenIDs exceeded 250 millions already, and the number of websites accepting them as login IDs passed by 10,000 and keeps growing with each day. Now, that's what I call "healthy growth"!

These being said, it's only a matter of time until OpenID becomes as popular as Google, because just as finding what you're looking for saves faster helps, using a single ID to log on to any site you can think of allows you save time, but it's not limited to that. OpenID is much more than just saving time, and I am sure that what we have at this time is only the dawn of a new era...