Several industry leaders in the tech industry, and in particular the online side of it, have officially joined the OpenID foundation as corporate board members, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, IBM, and VeriSign. This large step forward for the OpenID foundation could lead to quicker adoption of the technology which vows to eliminate the need for multiple accounts across different services, by essentially only making the user sign up once to use an account across all supporting services.
"With this support from these new company board members, the OpenID Foundation will be able to continue to promote and protect the technology and its community moving forward," said Bill Washburn, executive director, OpenID Foundation. "The community has expanded quickly since the inception of the foundation, and these companies will help bring OpenID into the mainstream markets."
Most, if not all, of these companies announced their support for OpenID long before today, but only today is that commitment set in stone–that is, we are almost certain to see OpenID appearing across Yahoo, Windows Live, Google, and many other online services.
In addition to making registration on sites easier, the OpenID Foundation also stresses the added security: only the information that a service needs will be given to it. So, once you register, only the company you register with has full access to the information.
However, the idea of OpenID is not without its criticisms. Many people feel that it would be very vulnerable to phishing attacks, thus giving a malicious person or group access to every single service registered under the same ID. In addition, the way it uses a third party to add information to the OpenID system has potential to make the service vulnerable.