OpenID 2.0 Final

OpenID 2.0 is finally a released specification. The announcement by the OpenID community yesterday stated:

It’s important to remember that this has been the work of many folks not only within the OpenID community but also the OpenID Foundation, AOL, Cordance, JanRain, Microsoft, NetMesh, Six Apart, Sxip, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign and Yahoo!. Microsoft was instrumental in helping with legal support and guidance combined with the insight of Sun and Yahoo! with their joint work in developing the right language. This is great news as it means that today not only is OpenID 2.0 final, but all of the contributors have sent a strong message that OpenID must be freely implementable world-wide.

Last week Google and Microsoft also showed their support of OpenID. In the Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View CA, both Microsoft and Google included OpenID features in beta products. Google announced the ability to comment on Blogger blogs using OpenID and Microsoft Research announced an experimental Provider.