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Yahoo, only one password!

Please enter your username and password. How many times do you see this during or average day on your computer.

Its probably close to double figures if you have to login to your computer, email, e-commerce, forums and social networking sites. You could be walking around with a least six or seven passwords if you don't use the same password on each site or computer. This may quickly become out of control if you visit many web sites with password protected areas for registered users.

Screenshot 1: What is OpenID, Credit openid.net

There is also an inherent risk from recycling the same password which is not a combination of upper and lower case letters with numbers.

There are many time saving applications similar to a key chain which store all your digital keys for web sites in your electronic life.

However what about one username and password for all of the sites in your life? There are several different services available such as Liberty Alliance sponsored by Sun Microsystem and Novell as well as Microsofts Passport and CardSpace. The service which is gaining a large amount of traction is OpenID.

OpenID has arisen from the open source community to solve the problems that could not be easily solved by other existing technologies and services to limit the number of passwords held by internet users. Before we go much further open source software is developed my groups of developers linked by common goals rather than formal commercial work.

This login technology offers a great opportinity - For businesses, this means a lower cost of password and account management, while drawing new web traffic. OpenID lowers user frustration by letting users have control of their login. - OpenID.net/what.

To date OpenID will allow users to login with one users name and passwords into any web sites which support the OpenID login technology. Currently there are nearly 10,000 domains which support the technology and 160 million OpenID accounts.

On the 18th January internet giant Yahoo decided to support the OpenID movement. This is a fantastic success for the OpenID foundation because Yahoo will triple the user base for the login service. To date there are something like 120 million users currently using OpenID. Yahoo and subsidiary flickr.com will bring 248 million to the party and inflate the number of users to 368 million.

This is an exciting change through out the landscape of the internet and computing. The impetuous for computing was to simplify and accelerate the rate we work and improve efficiencies in business. The OpenID movement stands to simplify cloud computing across the internet as users bounce between personal and public information across numerous web sites hosting personal blogs, emails, photo albums and social networking sites.

This news is certainly a very positive start to 2008 for OpenID and likely to improve as rumblings continue about Google testing the framework on popular blogging site Blogger.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence