ReadWriteWeb

What's the difference between Live Free or Die style independence and acting like Lady Gaga posturing in a dress made of meat? It could be economic viability, if you're a tech startup.

Long one of the most visible leaders of the open, federated identity technology OpenID, Portland, Oregon startup Janrain announced tonight that it has raised $15 million to build itself into a leading provider of identity management, for big branded websites seeking to leverage big brands of tech ID like Facebook Connect, Twitter and Google. The Wild West had terrible UX and never caught on like the dreamers dreamed. Now Janrain is building a business with OpenID in the background, almost just out of politeness it seems. Big ID has won and Janrain is serving it up on sites like CitySearch, MTV, NPR and yes, LadyGaga.com.

There are currently over 80 million active PayPal users and starting today, they will be able to use their PayPal credentials to log in to sites that use Janrain Engage to power their logins and sign-ups. Among today's launch partners are Mahalo, Interscope Records and Tal.ki.

Janrain is a Portland company working with the federal government to replace login and registration blocks with an OpenID framework. The company is the only service provider that is working with the Apps.Gov site to provide OpenID-based login and registration tools.

We asked JanRain CEO Brian Kissel to provide some background about OpenID in the federal government and the role the company plays in its adoption. Kissel is chairman of the OpenID Foundation.

Janrain recently relaunched its OpenID service as Janrain Engage.The service helps connects sites to the social web through APIs and widgets. Janrain Engage allows visitors to sign-in to sites with their social network accounts and then publish comments, purchases, reviews or other activities across the social Web.

It's been quite the month for the world of distributed social networking. Both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect - two services designed to help user manage a single profile across multiple sites - launched on the same day. Then, MySpace followed in close succession with their MySpaceID offering, another distributed social option built on the Open Stack. In a matter of days, the distributed social space went from nascent to completely confusing. Now, JanRain hopes to alleviate some of that confusion with RPX.