Today at the Future of Web Apps in London, Kevin Rose announced that Digg, the very popular social news site, plans to support OpenID. Digg will both accept OpenID and be an OpenID provider in the near future. Sam Sethi Mike Butcher of Vecosys, who was at FOWA, quotes Kevin:
Speaking after his presentation to Vecosys, Kevin Rose said: “We’ve been excited about OpenID for a while. We want to give people the freedom to move around online and this is a way to do it.” He added that the movement recently by AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other web giants to support the open identity system had effectively given Digg a green light to go ahead with their plans, which Rose said they had been thinking about before the likes of Microsoft announced OpenID support. “We had a lot of emails about it and had plans to support it before Microsoft, he said.
He said users will still be able to create a unique Digg ID, but they will also be able to log in with their OpenID. Digg will also “look into” the emerging network of reputation which OpenID implies, allowing legitimate users to benefit from the service, and locking out spammers.
It seems like every week a new company is announcing that they will support OpenID. The infrastructure is settling into place (though there are a lot more providers than accepters). The remaining challenge is getting people to use OpenID now that they have one.
OpenID will be addressed next week at ETel by Kaliya Hamlin in her session Empowering People and the Coming Identity Layer of Everything. OpenID is not new to ETel. In 2006, Johannes Ernst was espousing OpenID as a new telephone numbering mechanism system.