In one of my recent posts, I had listed my expectations from 2007, and among them, one was specifically about identification of virtual personalities. OpenID project, which looks like a non-profit organization, seems to have a good but overly-optimistic solution. Their idea is to assign a unique username for every netizen (i.e. net citizen), and construct a decentralized cross-platform that will enable independent websites to use the common infrastructure of OpenID to validate users.

To keep it simple, an analogy example from Yahoo network would be great I guess. Let’s say that you have been using Yahoo Mail for years but did not ever get into Flickr buzz. Suddenly, you feel the excitement of sharing the visuals with the world and want to signup for the service. You go to Flickr.com and see that you can sign in with your existing Yahoo ID. The same is also true for Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Music. The OpenID project is same in principle vs. Yahoo network, except the fact that the different websites does not necessarily be under the control of same person, group or company for you to carry your identity through different platforms. With an optimistic approach of extending the usage scale, this means we will be able to use the same user credentials to login to Google and Yahoo.

The downside is, there is still no barrier to create multiple OpenID credentials and use them to clone yourself. But, the most important benefit is harnessed by -let’s say- the good-intention netizens, which will save time in filling duplicate personal information and avoiding the need of updating every account of them when any changes occur in their personal info.

I am excited to see the development of the project and see which websites start to use OpenID authentication platform.