With all the buzz about Facebook Connect this week, its worth asking the question: Whatever happened to OpenID?
The universal log-in standard was created in 2005 by Brad Fitzpatrick, founder of LiveJournal, while he was working at blog software company Six Apart. (Fitzpatrick now works at Google; Six Apart has since sold LiveJournal.) It has the support of Yahoo, MySpace (which just helped build an OpenID extension for the Flock browser), and President-elect Barack Obama’s Change.gov. Even Google has dipped its proverbial toe in the pool. But it wasn’t until Facebook Connect started making headlines that the concept of data portability–a single log-in across multiple sites–made the jump from the tech press to the mainstream media. OpenID, some speculated, had been left behind in the dust.
