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Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90's he held his school's website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he's taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world.

The latest chapter in the fascinating story of Chris Messina's life ends with one of the most high-profile young proponents of an Open and Distributed Web joining Google, a company that aims to organize all the information in the world and a behemoth that many free spirits online eye with ambivalence. What will the future bring for Messina and his work? A look at how he got to Google might offer some clues. It isn't all pretty, some people worry about what the move will mean for the web, but the announcement is definitely important for all of us.

OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation. That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level.

While systems like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth are making fast progress in offering website users easy access to their primary identity, social and activity data when visiting sites all around the web - OpenID technology is making progress as well. Here are the three new leaders elected to help advance that agenda.

Respected industry thought leader, Joseph Smarr, announced on his blog today that he is leaving Comcast-acquired Plaxo to join Google and help drive the company's next steps in the social web. Smarr has been a key innovator in the OpenID, Oauth and related technical movements.

Smarr's work is all about enabling innovation by making it easy for users to move data from site to site.

At the close of a whiz-bang year, OpenID has a lot to be proud of.

With a community of nine million sites that use OpenID logins and one billion enabled accounts, OpenID has effectively revolutionized the way we are able to create and maintain portable identities. Best of all, it's not just bloggers and geeks who sang OpenID's praises: The U.S. federal government got on board this year, too.

The OpenID Foundation has announced nominations and upcoming elections for six open community board seats.

This year marks the Foundation's second election; last year, Snorri Giorgetti, Nat Sakimura, Chris Messina, David Recordon, Eric Sachs, Scott Kveton and Brian Kissel were elected. Of the current community board members, Messina and Sakimura were elected to two-year terms. Kveton has indicated he will not serve another term.

Ten private companies, a number of US Government Federal Agencies primarily in the Health sector and the OpenID and Information Card Foundations will announce this morning in Washington DC the launch of a pilot program to allow members of the public to log in to participating government websites with their credentials from approved independent websites.

That's right - someday soon you'll be able to log in to the websites of the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Insititute of Health and other government agencies with your accounts from Google, Yahoo and similar services. Below we discuss the privacy protection steps being taken, the usability issues and the ultimate significance of this announcement.

David Recordon, an outspoken young advocate for Open Source and Open Web technologies, is leaving blog software company SixApart to join Facebook.

He confirmed to us that he'll be starting on Monday with the title Senior Open Programs Manager. The move was first reported by Spencer E. Ante this afternoon in BusinessWeek.

Top government IT officials and representatives from online identity services met today in Washington DC to talk about plans to allow 3rd party certification bodies, called "Trust Framework Providers," to evaluate private sector OpenID and Info Card providers for use in logging into government agency websites.

The Open Government Identity Management Solutions Privacy Workshop is being held in Washington DC to draft a process for certifying existing identity providers for low-security government authentication transactions (so-called NIST level 1). If the plans move forward, we may someday be able to log in to government sites using our favorite OpenID-supporting website credentials. Google, AOL, Yahoo or other commercial accounts could become new keys to a consistent experience around the .gov web.

In addition to gaining a slew of information on your rights as a content owner, Creative Commons (CC) is offering new members
another great incentive. In exchange for buying a $50 annual membership, the organization is offering donors the chance to use their network log-in as their OpenID. In other words, if you're the type of person who shares their content for the good of education, art and humanity, now you can wear it like a badge across the networks you frequent.

Google plans to announce in coming weeks that it is turning each of the one million plus Google Apps customer domains into an OpenID provider, enabling millions of people to log in to OpenID-supporting websites with their work, school or organization ID.

"For these organizations," Google Security Product Manager, Eric Sachs, wrote on the public OpenID Board mailing list this morning, "Google Apps can now become an identity and data hub for multiple SaaS providers." Sachs appeared to believe his email was not being posted to a public board; he asked that it not be circulated so that some unusual technical work could be completed and political support shored up in the face of likely community and press cynicism. There's good reason for that - it may not be the good news it seems to be.

Users on Kmart's and Sears' web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.

In a few minutes Facebook will become the biggest example of a social network that allows users to log-in with OpenID credentials granted to them by other companies' websites. Major networks have said for months that their ID could be used as OpenID, but becoming "relying parties" that accepted OpenID from elsewhere was the step everyone was waiting for. The dam has broken.

It's ironic that it's Facebook that did it. Facebook is probably the most closed of all the major social networks (other than LinkedIn) and is so far ahead of everyone else in market share that traditional logic would argue that they have no interest in this kind of interoperability. This is the kind of step that was expected from networks more open and, frankly, far behind Facebook. Nevertheless, it has happened and it's big news.

The good folks over at Mozilla Labs posted a screencast this morning of an experimental new way to log in to websites while using the Firefox browser. The approach leverages the Mozilla Weave platform, an eighteen month old technology that ties together the local browser experience, with online data stored for users.

The new login method lets users log in to an OpenID supporting site or a traditional username/password site with one or zero clicks. It's a password manager, essentially, but it looks like an especially smooth one from one of the most trusted vendors online. And it syncs with the cloud so you could log in to your browser and then your favorite sites from any computer. It looks real nice.

In the old days, self-important people use to carry calling cards. Now we have Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites to turn us all into mini-celebrities. So what's the new calling card online? That position's being jockeyed for as we speak, and different contenders are taking very different approaches.

Twitter released an important new feature to selected developers yesterday that could make it a compelling alternative to the fast growing Facebook Connect system for logging into sites around the web.

A new survey from Gartner Research delivers some bad news regarding our online security practices: two-thirds of U.S. consumers use the same one or two passwords for all the websites they access. And they like it that way. Although people claim they're concerned about security, they still tend to use unsafe password management techniques rather than exploring new methods - be they new hardware, software, or new authentication frameworks like OpenID.

The awareness of OpenID continues to grow. At the same time, the OpenID Foundation - the organization founded to promote, protect, and enable OpenID technologies and community - has been growing too, adding new board members and sustaining sponsors. Today, another piece of the board came together, as the OpenID Foundation introduced its new executive director Don Thibeau.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look at the latest social networking statistics showing that Facebook has overtaken MySpace, review a product that's had great success using OpenID, continue our series on recommendation engines, check out the new version of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, review 4 innovative location-based apps, and more. Also check out the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

After a period of dramatic tension, social networking giant Facebook has joined forces with the OpenID community working for a distributed system of standards-based, non-proprietary user identity. It's a move we think bodes well for the web and yesterday the first big collaborative event was held since the union was announced. Facebook hosted an OpenID User Experience Summit at its headquarters in downtown Palo Alto.

Much like last month's summit on Activity Stream standards, we believe that yesterday's meeting was of historic proportion.

Chi.mp, the "online identity aggregator" that not only gives you a place to aggregate your updates but also gives you a free .mp domain name, just received a major makeover. Chi.mp now allows you to publish your own blog posts and photos on the site. In addition, Chi.mp now lets you customize your site with custom themes and it has gained the ability to push status updates to both Twitter and Facebook.

The most-watched geek event of the day has to be the OpenID UX (User Experience) Summit, hosted at the Facebook headquaters. The most discussed moment of the day will surely be the presentation by Comcast's Plaxo team.

Plaxo and Google have collaborated on an OpenID method that may represent the solution to OpenID's biggest problems: it's too unknown, it's too complicated and it's too arduous. Today at the User Experience Summit, Plaxo announced that early tests of its new OpenID login system had a 92% success rate - unheard of in the industry. OpenID's usability problems appear closer than ever to being solved for good.