OpenID

As part of the redesign of this website, users will be able to login to The Art of Music with Open ID.

So what is Open ID?

Open ID is a brilliant system allowing one ID to act as a guarantor of your identity across all the sites* you have signed up for. This, in turn, reduces the number of passwords that you need to maintain (you do use different passwords for each site you register with, don't you?!).

Look at this cartoon for an easier explanation.

A new hope

The Open ID Foundation has just signed up representatives of Google, IBM, Microsoft and Yahoo, and this "will give the project more momentum as between them these firms look after services that have hundreds of millions of users" (BBC News 11/02/2008).

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* Although this applies only to those sites that have Open ID login facility, there are currently over 10,000 sites using Open ID.