“Et puis zut” France Telecom Announce OpenID For All

France Telecom at Digital ID World today in San Francisco have just announced that all France Telecom subscribers (~40-million — the country is about 65-million people) now have an OpenID.

This makes FT the first major telco to support OpenID! They’re also talking about allowing access to Orange branded services with external accounts (hopefully OpenIDs). They just showed a draft screenshot of OpenID logins along with Google and Yahoo auth. Go to http://openid.orange.fr to learn more. Dave Recordon

This comes a day after OAuth spec was released to solve one of the internet identity problems: how do you let an app access your account at a web service without giving it your username and password. Yahoo, AOL, Flickr and Google all had a slightly different approach to solving this problem, which created additional overhead for developers. OAuth has a site here.