Today France Telecom has announced at Digital Identity World today that all Orange broadband subscribers now can use FT-hosted OpenIDs. This makes FT the first major telco to support OpenID.

I've known about this project for a while; I had the first discussions about this with them more than two years ago. It's great that it finally goes on-line. It's about 40,000,000 subscribers!

If there is any more doubt that OpenID matters beyond Silicon Valley, this announcement should put it to rest.

Congratulations to Ariel and all the FT/Orangle people who had a hand in this!

I am at Digital Identity World this week, which is taking place in San Francisco. If you are attending, too, please do feel free to intercept me for a chat.

This afternoon, I'll be on Kaliya Hamlin's panel on The Convergence of Internet-scale Identity Systems. We'll discuss the output of yesterday's strategic planning exercise that involved looking at a lot of possible future events relating the the adoption (or lack thereof) in the market of identity technologies. This was rather interesting, and I hope we'll do a reasonable job distilling those down during the panel.

Update: The ID Commons wiki now has a wiki page that lists the various events we looked at yesterday that may or may not happen in the future.

Update: The IRC backchannel is didw at Freenode.