Simon Willison, openID founder evangelist, gave an exciting presentation at the Future of Web Apps yesterday. OpenID is an open source login standard that is getting viral adoption. Simon expressed surprise at the number of services taking openID in the last three weeks; AOL, Symantec and Microsoft. That is a hundred million subscribers just there. Bill Gates’ endorsement must be any viral marketers dream influencer. Specially with Bill Gates’ strong pro-identity (senderID) work in the anti-spam community.
I find the openID whitelisting for spam elimination the most exciting. Finally, a viable mechanism to eliminate email and comment spam. OpenID finally adds one of the key pieces to the online reputation
mechanism. This in turn fills a big hole in building communities online.
There remains Google’s endorsement
