OpenID, the decentralized single sign on model for the web, enables users to sign-in into a website that supports OpenID creation and use that log-in for subsequent sites that support OpenID. The model removes the limitations posed by centralizes identity stores.

Recently OpenID got major backing from technology industry leaders like IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, IBM and many more.

An excerpt from Oreilly Radar:

Brad Fitzpatrick created OpenID to solve the problem of people commenting between different installations of LiveJournal. Using a URL-based identity for blog commenting made perfect sense, as the identity you are commenting with is your blog. However, the URL-based identity does confuse people, and so at the Social Graph Foo Camp, Brad et al came up with a proposal to map email addresses to OpenID URLs. Perhaps the idea of just using your email address to login will be easier to understand.

David Greenfield at ZDNet resonates the issue raised by TechCrunch as to all firms wanting to be identity providers and less of just authenticators. Well, the transition from just installed user base to measurement based on services offered by the website may get a beginning with OpenID.

A common presence framework for the user across the whole internet does reduce inertia to try out new services and in the long term should play out well for the industry.