What is OpenID
OpenID is an open, decentralised, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is essentially a global SSO (single sign-on) system.
As the most basic level, your OpenID identity is a unique URL. It can be a URL that you directly control (such as that of your personal Web page or blog) or one provided to you by a third-party service, such as an OpenID provider. In that sense, a site's use of OpenID identities is no different than using email addresses as identifiers: they are unique to each user and are verifiable. But you can publicly display an OpenID identity without attracting spam.
Using your OpenID to sign in to a compliant site involves four parties: you, whatever site hosts your OpenID URL, the site to which you are signing in, and an "identity server" which brokers the authentication between you and the site to which you are signing in. In the official OpenID parlance, the site to which you are signing in is referred to as the "consumer." Since OpenID is designed to be completely decentralized, you have some options to whittle the above list down to three players instead of four. If you run your own Web server, you can use your site to both host your OpenID URL and run your own identity server. Alternatively, if you create an account on one of the public OpenID providers, that provider can both host your OpenID URL and act as the identity server.
(By Nathan Willis), for full article: http://www.linux.com/articles/60677 Further
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