The possibility that Net users may one day be able to safely use a individual log-in and password for multiple web sites advanced Thursday. The OpenID Foundation, which is working to develop an identity-management system for the Web, announced that software giants Google, IBM, VeriSign and Yahoo have joined its executive board.

“With that support from the new company board members, the OpenID Foundation will be able to continue to promote and protect the technology and its community moving forward,” said Bill Washburn, executive director of the OpenID Foundation. “The community has clearly expanded since the inception of the foundation and these companies will help bring OpenID into the mainstream markets.”

Mitchell Savage, executive vice president of Vidoop, which provides secure log-ins on the OpenID platform, said, “The addition of these organizations to the OpenID Foundation is an immense step forward not just for OpenID, but for every Net user who is fed up with maintaining scores of

user names, passwords, cookies and credentials. A snowball just started down a very big hill called the entire Web.”

One Password for Them All

For aging baby boomers who find it hard to remember multiple log-ins and passwords for numerous sites, the OpenID concept offers relief. But acceptance of the technology has been slow.

The foundation says there are currently more than 350 million OpenIDs, and 10,000 Web sites that accept an OpenID log-in. Relatively few of those sites, however, are well known. That may change now that some of the Internet’s largest players have come on board.

“The chicken/egg dilemma has now been passed,” Savage said. “With hundreds of millions of OpenID users now asking ‘Where can I use my new OpenID?’, Web sites will start accepting the credential to gain usership. With the addition of these players (and Yahoo as a major ID provider), accepting the…

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