After Microsoft recently announced its support for the OpenID system, AOL has started to support OpenID, giving the free identification scheme 63 million new users.
OpenID is a decentralized digital identity system, in which any user's online identity is given by URI (such as for a blog or a home page) or an XRI in the latest version, and can be verified by any server running the protocol.

For now, anyone who has an AOL and AIM account can use those details to login to other OpenID sites, but AOL's own services, do not yet accept credentials from other OpenID providers.

OpenID's specifications are created by an online community and are freely available for software makers to build into their applications.