The Telegraph continues to re-invent itself with bleeding-edge web technology by announcing yesterday that it plans to become an OpenID provider by the end of February. The newspaper will be the first in the world - and the first British media company - to provide OpenID logins and the news came on the same day as Yahoo! announced their plans to do the same.

What this means for the Telegraph’s users is that they will have to remember fewer passwords in future and find it easier to move seamlessly between other OpenID sites (other sites include the well-known conservative hang-outs Digg and Blogger). OpenID provides users with a sort of passport (not be confused with Microsoft Password, which was an earlier, proprietary and therefore evil attempt to do this).

Reaction from Telegraph users themselves has been been muted. The news at Shane Richmond’s blog was received in characteristically crotchety fashion:

Web interoperability, identity and data portability and open standards are all white hot issues for 2008, and The Telegraph have stolen a march on competitors with this announcement. It will certainly create a buzz in the UK media blogosphere and it will benefit The Telegraph’s users as more sites sign up to OpenID. It also solves the Telegraph’s single sign-in challenge, a problem caused by having lots of websites running on different technologies. But actually, given the Telegraph’s elderly online demographic, having to remember fewer passwords may well be a ‘killer app’ in its own right.

Tags: openid telegraph media