January 30, 2008 has been reserved as the date for the public beta launch, consolidating the Yahoo ID to an OpenID account at the partners sites.

OpenID is the brainchild of Web 2.0 guru Brad Fitzpatrick, who's also known as the founder of LiveJournal and has played an active role on Google's OpenSocial developer initiative since last year.

Off late the OpenID 2.0 standard for a universal Internet log-in has been the hot topic and was often considered as the Internet's futuristic pipe dream.

Picture Credits: OpenID

Yahoo!'s count of registered users stands at 248 million and with this move the OpenID compatible accounts would amount to 368 million Web users. Alongside all the buzz, there are security concerns as well.

It is being projected that as more players like Yahoo! follow suit, the number of users would include thousands of casual users. While users have the freedom to trust sites with their OpenID accounts, it isn't guaranteed that all the sites are worth their trust.

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