It looks like the Windows Live team is at it again. They’ve taken the plunge at PDC 2008 and committed to supporting the OpenID initiative.
All Windows Live product teams are committed to supporting open standards where such standards are relevant to our work and when they reach a sufficient level of maturity, and the Windows Live ID Team is no exception. We have been tracking the evolution of the OpenID specification, from its birth as just a dream and a vision through its development into a mature, de facto standard with terms that make it viable for us to implement it now.
We look forward to making it easier for our users to access the Web sites they use, by reducing their need to create additional identity accounts. That is the promise of OpenID. We are happy to support that goal by providing OpenID-based sign-in functionality to Windows Live ID account holders.
This may not seem like much but its Microsoft validating an open standard and making every one of their Hotmail and Passport users have ubiquitous access to a growing number of OpenID-enabled websites.
Well done to the Windows Live team.
Awesome.. now we just need a tool to merge all the openIDs from every vendor now offering them. Maybe there’s room for a MetaID service 🙂
It’s also strange that Google hasn’t yet added OpenID support (outside of blogger..).