With Microsoft and Google's Support, Most People Have Access To OpenID

On Monday, Microsoft announced they would be supporting OpenID through their Microsoft Live accounts. On Tuesday, Google followed suit with its own announcement that Google accounts would serve as OpenID accounts.

Add in Yahoo, who has supported OpenID for a while now, and anyone using Gmail, Yahoo Mail or Hotmail now has a valid OpenID account. In addition to the three most popular names on the web, MySpace and AOL also support OpenID.

This leaves Facebook as about the only major holdout to the OpenID movement, and they may follow soon enough given that websites aren't lining up around the corner in support of Facebook Connect.

What does this mean for you?

How many usernames and passwords are you juggling? Do you find that you often need to have a password mailed to you because you just plain forgot which password you used for that site?

OpenID is the solution to the nightmare of having dozens of accounts strewn across the web. Instead of managing each one independently, OpenID gives you a global account to log into websites, thus easing the burden of keeping up with all of those passwords.

With Google and Microsoft now on board, anyone using Hotmail, Gmail or Yahoo mail can now just use their email credentials as their OpenID account.