Just learned from a a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb that OpenID is now being accepted on the Change.gov, the official transition site for President Elect Obama. I immediately went over to check it out. The experience was a bit messed up, but ulitmately I was able to get it to work. (You first have to use your OpenID to create an account on Intense Debate; once you do that you’re good to go.)
As you can see in the picture below, once logged in, my profile photo showed up, too. (I used an OpenID from JanRain’s myopenid.com service.)
What a great sign of new possibilities, as we look forward to the first Internet-savvy administration. Can we get OpenID broadly established in 2009? Yes, we can! Can we use the Social Web’s new “open stack” to bring about a more participatory era in American democracy? Yes, we can!
We discussed Obama’s Social Web strategy recently on The Social Web TV:
More commentary by David Recordon here and VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon here.
The Real McCrea 
This is great news. Wow, how … presidential. It looks like the implementation is a little bit broken … I tried “yahoo.com” and “openid.yahoo.com” but it didn’t accept either one. Perhaps it doesn’t support XRDS or directed identity? But I’m sure once they work out the bugs it will be great. That website will be really helpful in introducing policymakers to this new-fangled technology.
Speaking of, no OpenID login for commenting on your blog? What gives?