Orange (aka France Telecom) has decided to use openID as their unique authentication solution for more than 40 millions of their users. This is a big news for mainly 2 reasons:

• they are the first world wide company to announce the use of openID publicly (ok AOL use it too, as well as Plaxo), although it is only for their own customers, it is still a good start.
• a year ago or so, France Telecom announced a huge technological partnership with Microsoft. Now, I wonder why they choose openID and what is going to be MS reaction with their Passport and co.

There are some interesting and more-experts-than-me comments on the planet openID. So now, what about Google, Facebook and co? It would be great to have them using this solution too. By the way, you can easily find wordpress plugins to integrate openID and wordpress.