Doing my usual Facebook maintenance tonight and I see another intriguing advertisement. The mix of the hot chicks and making more money got me wondering what it was all about. Was this an ad for swim suit models? Who could be behind such an ad?

Well, it is my “old friend” Jeff who is now is “Dave Williams from Bellevue , WA”. Interesting. I live in Bellevue WA as well. Nice targeted marketing Dave/Jeff/Kevin. Even though he is now Dave, the image filename is still “about_jeff.gif” He still is showing the “stimulus” check that he got from the US Treasury. Guessing he got that check (yeah, right), figured out how to run ads on Facebook and Google to get paid to send people to a site selling a kit to make money from Google. This sounds like the kit that Dave/Jeff/Kevin bought where he learned he could make money sending other people to buy the kit. Image of ad below. Link was http://davegetsgreen.com/.

TechCrunch wrote an article asking if the Big Boys were exploiting OpenID. The crux of the argument was that they are providing OpenIDs, but are not accepting them. In other words, they are an OpenID Provider, but not a Relying Party.  John McCrea echos what Michael said, and Jason Kolb and David Recordon also wrote posts — and I agree that it is great that the Big Boys have joined in — but I think it is unfair of Michael and John to expect them to be Relying Parties.

Googles Blogger does take OpenIDs for comments, which as I have stated in the past, is a good use of OpendID. But OpenID still has a ways to go before you can trust it for secure sign on. I would not want to use it for accessing my Yahoo or gmail accounts.

Having said that, there are two things to hold the Big Boys feet to the fire:

1. Support Attribute Exchange: Single sign on is nice, but browsers will remember your password for you. (Sxipper does it really well of course!) Filling in forms and keeping your information up to date on servers would be really useful. This goes against the grain of the Big Boys as it makes it easier for users to register on sites other then their own — but it is a real benefit to the user and lowers the registration friction — and it would show that they really want to help the user as opposed to just deepening the silo.
2. Advance the OpenID Technology: There are valid reasons for not being an RP for sensitive sites, but we need to advance the technology to overcome them. The Big Boys can direct some of their bright talent to working with the community in general to overcome these issues.

Today Microsoft, Yahoo,  IBM, VeriSign, and Google have joined the OpenID Foundation as corporate board members. This big news for OpenID. With Yahoo and Google becoming OpenID Providers earlier this year, this is really shaping up to be the year of OpenID.

First coverage I see of the announcement is at CNN Money. That’s funny.

Updated 6:57AM

Mike Jones from Microsoft blogged here about. Interesting to see the press release up at Microsoft’s PressPass with a quote from Google.