Yahoo appears close to implementing OpenID, a Web authentication standard that relieves people of the need to remember multiple passwords to log into different Web sites. Yahoo controls a domain me.yahoo.com, which shows a short message indicating the company will act as an identity provider for OpenID. OpenID, an open-source project, has gained support from two other major Internet players, Microsoft and Google. However, those companies are not widely providing support on their sites for OpenID yet.

"I expect Yahoo's implementation to be a major influence in encouraging OpenID 2 adoption," wrote Simon Willison, a freelance Web consultant and developer who used to work for Flickr. In January last year, Willison launched idproxy.net, a Web site that links Yahoo IDs and OpenIDs.

OpenID is referred to as a decentralized system since no one company or entity controls all of the identity information. It gives users more power to determine who they want to share their identity with and avoids the potential security problems of having a massive amount of data locked up in a single database. The system is also free.

Web sites acting as an identity provider for OpenID give users a unique URL (Uniform Resource Locator). When a person encounters another Web site supporting OpenID, they can enter that URL along with the password they have registered with the identity provider, which is then verified in order to login at the new site.

Read the complete article by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service.