OpenID 2.0 Final

Late summer 2005, Brad Fitzpatrick at Six Apart came up with OpenID to facilitate authenticating your ownership of a URL to another website. The driving force behind this was to enable commenting across multiple blogging sites with the need for accounts on each of these services.

On 5th December 2007 OpenID 2.0 specifications has been released.

OpenID 1.0 is largely about authentication. OpenID 2.0 adds several important new capabilities:

- directed identities
- attribute exchange
- support or large requests and responses
- robust support or extensions
- support for XRIs

OpenID should be viewed as a core fundamental enabling technology. It allows the authentication and exchange of account data between un-related websites. Indeed, it does not attempt to solve higher level problems, such as authorization. Instead you can invision it as the underlying technology for interactions between social networks.

More than 8,000 websites currently accept OpenID and this figure is growing by five percent per week.