Archive notice: This article was originally published on February 8, 2008. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The OpenID Foundation http://openid.net/foundation announced yesterday, Thursday, that five major companies are now represented on the Foundation’s Board of Directors. Alongside long-standing OpenID supporter VeriSign and Google, IBM and Yahoo, the quintet now also officially includes Microsoft. Following its accession to Dataportability http://dataportability.org, Microsoft is thus now visibly involved in the key OpenID technology too.
In contrast to Yahoo’s announcement that it would become an OpenID provider under the current 2.0 specifications and Google’s now direct support for OpenID 1.1 with Blogger, the current announcement immediately prompted scepticism in the online community. There are widespread fears that Microsoft will undermine OpenID in some form. Yet Microsoft itself has already been testing OpenID servers for some time, as OpenID expert Thomas Huhn, operator of OpenID Blog Germany http://openidgermany.de, explains to pressetext.
OpenID technology is particularly interesting in connection with social-networking activities such as blogging, but also plays a role in the area of security precautions on the web, IBM states. ‘Attacks on privacy on the internet, in which information is lost or web identities are misused, have been increasing recently,’ explains Anthony Nadalin, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Chief Security Architect at IBM Tivoli Software. IBM now intends to contribute its own expertise in the fields of internet security and open source to promote the security of web identities.
Should the reported takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft occur, OpenID could emerge as an approach to integrating the web services of both companies. If Windows Live ID were to mutate into an OpenID, this would probably also be possible without completely opening the services to the outside. Yahoo has already demonstrated this. Although the company is an OpenID provider and use of the Yahoo ID is possible with other providers, if the user possesses an OpenID from another online service — Google, for example — access to Yahoo nevertheless remains denied.
