The nice folks at Yahoo! indeed know how to be nice in a collaborative community, (i.e. the OpenID community). Their big Yahoo! OpenID Provider service now available as a public beta announcement today acknowledges a lot of people … to quote:
We’d like to take this opportunity to thank the OpenID community for educating us over the past 1 year and helping us make this happen. In particular, we’d like to say "Thank you" to Bill Washburn, Brian Ellin, David Recordon, Dick Hardt, Johannes Ernst, Johnny Bufu, Joseph Smarr, Josh Hoyt, Kaliya Hamlin, Kevin Turner, Larry Drebes, Mike Graves, Scott Kveton, and Simon Willison.
Not every company as big as Yahoo! would acknowledge all of us little guys. And so Shreyas and his team of Yahoos very much deserve a round of applause and thanks. (After the 248 million-strong applause has died down ;-)).
On a personal note, I gotta say I’m still very amazed. It was just over three years ago that I looked at that idea of a URL-based, decentralized, simple identity again that I had put aside a year earlier, and decided "perhaps there is something to this after all". And started blogging about it. Brad Fitzpatrick started the OpenID mailing list in the following May, putting 7 million LiveJournal users online with a URL-based identity shortly thereafter. Then VeriSign, and AOL, and France Telecom/Orange, even Google/Blogger. And now all of Yahoo … not exactly bad, from 1 to almost 400 million in just over three years?