openid

Looks like further advances are being made to make the OpenID signin procedure smoother for users, following in the footsteps of previous experiments by Plaxo on this front. The mini-popup actually works surprisingly well, compared to complete browser redirect to the ID provider site, and the two-in-one (signin + approve data sharing) approach certainly is smooth (after testing my Yahoo ID on http://www.mysears.com).

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/09/yahoo_openid_hybrid.htm...

...
Building on their successful experience with Yahoo! OpenID, Plaxo is experimenting with the Hybrid Protocol: A portion of new users who sign up for Plaxo with their Yahoo! account, are now enabled to sign in to Plaxo with their Yahoo! account and to authorize two-way data sharing of their Yahoo! Contacts and Updates via the Hybrid Protocol.
... 

Another interesting development around e-Government or Government 2.0 in the US:

Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo, Wave Systems Pilot Open Identity for Open Government

 Ten industry leaders — Yahoo!, PayPal, Google, Equifax, AOL, VeriSign, Acxiom, Citi, Privo and Wave Systems — announced today they will support the first pilot programs designed for the American public to engage in open government — government that is transparent, participatory, and collaborative. This open identity initiative is a key step in President Obama’s memorandum to make it easy for individuals to register and participate in government websites — without having to create new usernames and passwords. Additionally, members of the public will be able to fully control how much or how little personal information they share with the government at all times.

These companies will act as digital identity providers using OpenID and Information Card technologies. The pilot programs are being conducted by the Center for Information Technology (CIT), National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and related agencies. The participating companies are being certified under non-discriminatory open trust frameworks developed under collaboration between the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) and the Information Card Foundation (ICF) and reviewed by the federal government.
... 

In previous sections of this primer we introduced several aspects of the identification problem and outlined scenarios where a universal authentication system forms an integral part of the solution (see Figure 1 below). Now it is time to investigate how this may work in practice, which technologies (in addition to OpenID) might play a role, and how a researcher might leverage these tools to aggregate information about himself in a meaningful way.

This part of our web series discusses the merits of a user-centric system for individual identification on the Internet and the role OpenID and related network protocols have to play in this regard.

A number of ostensibly separate initiatives, with diverse objectives, have begun considering the risks, benefits, and practicalities of unambiguously identifying researchers as they use and contribute to biomedical data sources on the Internet. The GEN2PHEN project is one such initiative, given its general aim of helping to unify human and model organism genetic variation databases towards increasingly holistic views into Genotype-To-Phenotype (G2P) data.