Social news bookmarking site Digg will adopt the increasingly popular OpenID passwords framework amongst a raft of new features.
Founder Kevin Rose announced at the Future of Web Apps (FoWA) conference in London yesterday that similar announcements this year from Microsoft, Yahoo! and AOL had hastened the site’s move.
OpenID involves using URLs for authentication, with credentials checked against a password hosted by users’ own OpenID host. Many commentators have forecast the standard will gain significant popularity in 2007.
Rose and his developers show no signs of slowing the pace of new features. According to a report from FoWA: “The future for Digg includes 900,000 users who could get more community tools, enhancing the reward system, a fact-checking system, swarming the stories with links/pictures/video, location-based opinions and heat maps around hot topics”.
Users will also be able to export their Digg friends networks to the likes of Facebook and Reddit.