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…
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)