For website owners, enabling web applications to talk to one another within the same web page can be frustrating and can take countless hours of development. How should apps communicate with each other in a meaningful way? The OpenID Foundation’s new Backplane Protocol Work Group is focused on this exact problem -- helping website owners, application developers and systems integrators simply and securely integrate apps from different providers into a seamless user experience. Growing from industry cooperation over the last two years, Backplane Protocol has evolved quickly and is now a mature specification. Backplane Protocol serves as a “message bus” for social applications, enabling applications developed by disparate vendors to communicate with each other in real-time. It builds on proven and popular open standards work by leveraging technologies such as OpenID, OAuth, and Portable Contacts, reducing the need for developers to learn and develop against other vendors’ proprietary APIs. Announced July 16, 2012 at the OpenID Foundation Summit in Vail, Colorado,  this new OpenID work group is seeking additional input and participation from the world wide OpenID community, ultimately enabling application developers and systems integrators to bring more robust solutions to websites faster and more cost effectively. With the launch of the OpenID Backplane Protocol Work Group, we invite the OpenID community to help greatly expand current use cases and to drive the standard forward. For parties interested in participating in the work group, please join the mailing list and complete an intellectual property agreement. You can learn more about the adoption and implementation of the Backplane Protocol at http://backplanex.com. Follow @OpenID on Twitter to stay up-to-date on all of the OpenID work groups and events.