For years now Google has been expanding into a plethora of markets outside of its well known search engine and into the highly competitive areas of the net such as email, news, blogs, maps, and many others which Google has simply recreated or bought out a smaller company specializing in that market. The amazing thing about all this is that many of these services have been around for years. Many people have even dropped Yahoo and AOL in favor of Gmail even with a lack of features and a long history of being marked as a beta. Despite being late to the game these products have proved highly successful and many hope that these services will eventually reach the same quality of the Google search engine.
With this expansion we have seen the creation of a Google Account which allows one to have a single sign-on to which they can access all of Google's services. This is a similar approach that OpenID aims to take for all user based services on the web and not just that of one entity. OpenID is a decentralized digital identity that is based off of a URL for authentication such as a domain name, blog, or a specialized service that provides a URL to you. Your account is actually stored on the providers server and any service that uses OpenID will communicate with that provider to check for authentication. This removes the need for multiple accounts across the web and no one person is in control of all the IDs.
I predict that Google will soon start supporting OpenID by using our GooglePages URL. Our Google Account will in a sense become our account for everything. One of the main reasons I see them doing this is because they have always been supportive of open protocols and a fan of simplifying and unifying the web. I think GTalk is a classic example of this. In my opinion, the GTalk application pretty much sucks because of its awkward interface, and an extreme lack of necessary features. I think the main point of GTalk was never to create an impressive instant messenger application but to allow Google users to communicate over the Jabber protocol and to use a third-party application which contains more features. This illustrates Google's support for open protocols and allows users to use their Google Account for other mediums on the web.
While not everyone is a fan of putting all their eggs in one basket, I personally enjoy the ease of use and I know many people who are frustrated with remembering usernames and passwords for multiple accounts and the annoying sign-ups required on so many sites these days. Such a system might prove to be more secure because it will be more practical for users to create stronger passwords and not have to write them down to remember them. There are other benefits to this technology as well and I believe Google can utilize them for a better user experience.
Why would Google want to do all this though? There are benefits to the technology itself and although Google strives to "do no evil", there has to be more reasons behind it than being a "nice thing to do." By supporting OpenID people will start using their Google Account more which will increase ad revenue and people who are still currently using Yahoo will find Google to be a more suitable alternative for their all-in-one internet portal. This will also make it much easier for Google to have one universal account for all of their services which are not part of the current Google system. YouTube, Orkut, and Blogger will be combined without massive overhauls on Google's part and one will be able to utilize their Google Account to log into any potential service that will use the OpenID system. I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google wasn't already working on this. I firmly believe OpenID will be a part of Google in 2007.