Openid is a lot in the news these last couple of months. Apparently, people are getting interested in the concept. But why so late ? I've had the urge to get rid of all the different logins and passwords years ago, but apparently people have accepted this for years, thinking it's 'normal'. Well, it's not. So what is OpenId ?

OpenID is a decentralized system to verify one's online identity. While it is not intended to prevent spam or create a trust metric,[1] it solves the single sign-on problem without relying on any centralized website to confirm digital identity. (Wikipedia)

Okay, so why isn't this globally in use then ? Because not all companies are prepared to comply to the standard. But, good news is published every day : more and more companies support it.

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. ()

Another good read on the subject is Answer.com : Link

For curious readers, here's a hat tip : If you have a vox account, you already have an OpenId.