It’s clear that companies like Yahoo! and AOL are natural OpenID providers. Telcos like Orange should also want to be OpenID providers (of course, they all are already).
But according to today’s news, the Telegraph (newspaper and website in the UK) is now also becoming an OpenID provider.
As somebody expressed in the comments said, it makes every sense for a newspaper to become an OpenID Relying Party, but why would they also want to host identities?
Nevertheless, it’s a bit gratifying to see that, because over a year ago I predicted exactly that: I thought that everybody and their brother was going to attempt to become the OpenID provider of choice for as many users as possible. Because everybody strategically minded would decide that they most certainly did not want their competitors to have that role, with them "merely" being relying parties, relying on the security of their competitors! And worse, letting their competitors see every time their customers authenticated with them.
My prediction for 2008: the already-long list of OpenID providers is going to grow substantially, and we’ll see many mainstream businesses, like the Telegraph, joining as OpenID providers. Some day, there will be a shake out, but it won’t be in 2008. It’s clear that there is some justification for the land rush, and first movers in any given market can hope to gain substantially on a strategic level over their competitors.
It also points to the adoption dynamic for relying parties: companies that believe to be the "gorilla" in their respective markets will push their business partners to accept OpenIDs from them, and preferably only from them. That will look like many closed federations for some time, but it’s inevitable that those will get opened — relying parties will see to that. This OpenID provider rush, and the push into closely affiliated relying parties, are going to be the primary business dynamics for OpenID for the next 18 months or so, in my view.
[Pitch: if you are facing this emerging business dyamic and want to figure out what your strategic options are, get in touch. We’d love to help you out.]