Simon Willison's talk on the openID platform was nothing if not inspirational.  Although i think he correctly points out that it's very early day for it, and it's not really ready for the majority of users, he gave a really good overall impression that as a system for a unified login it's most definitely a good start and something for us all to start working on.  I think he spoke a little too quickly for my Spanish friends though, but what do they know about t'internet? :D

Basically, openID is a system where you no longer need to remember a load of different usernames and passwords for all the different sites you use - but can, instead, can have a single, individual (wel, you can have several if you so want!) login that will let you into all of the sites you use if they subscribe to the openID system. 

Being a distributed system, openID isn't reliant on any single provider, and if you so wanted, you could actually setup your own openID server to use if you wanted to. 

Seems like there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this area, and with the recent announcements from AOL, Microsoft and the like about adoption of the openID format (for example, ALL AOL users (and that's a LOT of users!) now, immediately, have an openID account by default) it looks like openID is about to become a lot more visible than perhaps it was only a week or so ago.

I think the opportunities for advertisers and marketers in the future could be vast in relation to this -  we need to look more at how this would affect our own particular industry, but my first guess is that anything which helps users to trust and feel in control of the information they share with us, and let's face it, we often get a bad wrap, is nothing but a good thing and I am sure we'll be covering it some more on this site in the future as more information on openID comes online.

Simon says he will be publishing the slides and a few other things online in the next few days, and my advice is to go check them out.

Great stuff!

Howard
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