Hot on the heels of Yahoo’s announcement to get on board with OpenID comes the news that Microsoft, Google, IBM, and VeriSign are all jumping on too. That’s fantastic news. If they stick to it, I’m sure it won’t take too long for everyone else to follow suit, and we’ll finally have that Internet-wide authentication system.

While we’re already taking advantage of OpenID on Basecamp, Backpack, and Highrise and integrating them all through our OpenBar, there’s still a lot more to do. We have quite a few plans to take OpenID usage even further and the news that all the big boys are starting to pay attention as well only prove to encourage those plans.

So if you haven’t already looked into this whole OpenID thing, I’d strongly recommend doing so. It’s one of those things where before you have it, it doesn’t really seem like a big deal. But once you do, you find it hard to believe you ever lived without it. And you’ll be somewhat annoyed when applications don’t support it (yes, yes, we’ll get Campfire on board as well).