The Real McCrea

Two nice pieces yesterday on how OpenID picked up steam in 2008. David Recordon’s post at OpenID.net is simply entitled 2008:Momentum. It offers a great review of the progress made last year:

2008 was an awesome year for OpenID where the community created significant momentum moving toward mainstream adoption. No, not every site on the web is using OpenID nor does every consumer know what OpenID does, but last year alone the number of sites that accept OpenID for sign in more than tripled1. Today, there are over thirty-thousand publicly accessible sites supporting OpenID for sign in and well over half a billion OpenID enabled accounts.

He supports the claim of momentum with no fewer than 11 proof points!

The other post is from Wired.com’s Michael Calore, entitled Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down. David Recorodon and I are both quoted in the piece. Michael focused on the traction OpenID is showing in the area of blog commenting, which led to this great quote from David:

“Blog commenting is not a niche,” he says. “Social activity on blogs in total dwarfs social activity on any particular social network.”
“If anything, the success of OpenID and Facebook Connect in situations such as commenting on blogs, coupled with a number of high-profile sites, will continue pushing this idea toward a mainstream audience that cares about being able to easily sign in, find people they know, and share what they’re doing on the web.”

Let’s hope that the incredible gains OpenID made in 2008 will be matched and exceeded in 2009. With strong support from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Six Apart, Plaxo and more than 30,000 other sites, I think that’s fairly likely.

Also worth checking out is David’s other recent post, this one at Six Apart’s blog, detailing enhancements to Typepad Connect, with expanded support for OpenID, including user-friendly click-the-logo sign-in via Google and Yahoo accounts!