As a great way to lead into the Internet Identity Workshop this week in Mountain View CA, both Microsoft and Google shipped OpenID features in beta products this past Friday. Microsoft Research announced an experimental Provider while Google announced the ability to comment on Blogger blogs using OpenID. As some backstory, this past February at the RSA Conference Bill Gates and Craig Mundie announced Microsoft's support of OpenID 2.0. (See Read/WriteWeb's coverage...they're the first result on Google) Since that time there has been a lot of great progress made which culminates with a posting by Kim Cameron's (Microsoft's Lead Identity Architect). In addition to being able to authenticate to MyOpenID.com and VeriSign's PIP using CardSpace, the promise to develop a specification which conveys stronger authentication was used has seen its second (quite stable) draft. We're very quickly getting to a world where OpenID can be used to move around the web, CardSpace (or other technologies such as tokens) can be used to authenticate to your OpenID Provider, and the Relying Party can find out that you didn't use a password at all. In addition to this technological work, Microsoft has been incredibly involved in helping the OpenID Community develop an IPR Policy and Process that can be used moving forward to ensure that future specifications are not patent encumbered. You can learn more about the IPR work underway at http://openid.net/foundation/intellectual-property/. Up until Friday little had been heard from Google in regards to OpenID support. The Blogger Beta has a very clear interface for both enabling and commenting with OpenID. Additionally as the Blogger team is using the OpenID4Java library mainly developed by Sxip Identity, they should have support for OpenID 2.0 as well. Google has also announced that work is underway to have Blogger operate as an OpenID Provider as well. Many others have written about the Blogger announcement too. All in all, an extremely great way to finish the week before IIW!